teenybeany

Dedicated to: Beijing
My trip to Beijing, China was nothing but an eye opening experience. I hate that word, really, i think it's so juvenile, but i don't think i can describe beijing any other way.

Right when we got to the airport, there were SO MANY people at the arrival gates waiting to pick up their own guests. We had never seen so many people waiting at an arrival gate! You would think this is really nothing big, but if you were there and saw the people crammed infront of there, you would be amazed too. Not only were there so many people, but they were all yelling chinese, and waving signs. Oh boy.

We saw a lot. The wall of china was amazing. Humongous. Really. So so big. If you try and walk the whole thing, it takes a few hours, not to mention your life. So we took a cable car up and then my sister and i walked a portion of it up to the highest point of the wall. It was so dope. We also went to Tiananmen Square, which in truth, I was so dead scared to go to. But it was cool. More than that, it was really really so god damn hot and humid. We couldn't really take in much of what was there because our brains were melting.

But it was there where I saw the saddest and most horrible thing. You see, all over Tianenmen Sqaure, there are homeless people. Most homeless people walk around picking up and searching for empty bottles in garbage cans. I saw this one teeny little girl digging through a garbage can and a sight like that truly breaks your heart. Later on, I stood and watched a fight between two homeless men. Me, and about 600 other people that were around. Two men were fighting over a bottle, or over that garbage can spot, I didn't really know, but it was the worst thing I had ever seen in a human. The fight wasn't a stupid brawl over nothing; it was a fight over, life. They were kicking and hitting eachother with their bags of empty bottles. And then one of the guy's bags opened and he dropped all his empty bottles. It was so sad. I can still vividly see one of the men in the fight. He was wearing a dark emerald green long sleeve shirt, black pants, had dark long shaggy hair, and he kept smiling a devious smile to his opponent. The wierd thing was, his teeth were perfect and white. I'll never forget that smile. When I finally came back to life after being so immersed in watching the fight, I looked around and everyone had stopped walking too and were watching the fight. Everyone, including little kids holding on to their parents hands. I imagined what it felt like to be them at that moment, because I was scared being 18 (19 in Asia) years old.

Later that night, I watched my sister throw nine empty bottles into the trash. I thought of how much those homeless people at Tiananmen Square would literally, kill, to have those.

I saw so much more than just that fight. I walked on streets lined with handicapped people begging for money. One little girl was standing there with a plastic bowl begging for money, holding onto her grandfather's hand. Her grandfather, who was blind, was playing an instrument. I saw one man begging for money, and his body form was one you only saw in pictures or nightmares. One girl was lying on a board, begging for money. She was lying there bceause she couldn't move because her bone structure was all messed up. I'm usually "scared" or too shocked to look straight at disabled people, but when it's right there in front of you, in real life, you just can't look away. And it's not so scary anymore. Because it's reality.

So after we took that dreadful walk (although, for some reason it seemed only dreadful for me because everyone else seemed to ignore them reasonably well) we rode on carriages attached to the back of bikes and were "driven" through a village. The village was full of shacks, flies, and residents with not much hope. I thought this village was the poorest of the poor, but apparently, it was a rich village. I could not believe it.

I'm running out of time. I'll keep updating later.

banana