Sketches of China: Beijing

After 3 weeks in Xi’an, I moved on to Beijing, but only for a few days before leaving for a 9-day trip around the southeastern part of the Tibetan Plateau. Then I was back in Beijing for a day before a four-day trip to Shenyang. Than another few days in Beijing before a day trip to Nanjing. After all that, I had another 10 days in Beijing, which gave me a bit more time to focus on work and focus through the lens.

When I was last in Beijing (in 2013), I visited the standard tourist destinations: the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, Tienanmen Square, the hutongs, and the various palaces.This time, when I wasn’t working, I spent my few off-hours enjoying Olympic Park or wandering the main streets and side streets in the northwest part of the city in and around the Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences where I was based and the seemingly innumerable universities in the same area. Much of my time in Beijing also included the Golden Week holiday that follows on National Day, which I spent at the Badachu Park. So my photographic sketches of Beijing could be considered mundane, as in “of this world.” But still worth looking it, I think!

As I wrote the other day, I’m entranced by the tricycles that carry anything and everything. Here’s a reprise of my favorite four (click on any of them to see larger ones as a slide show).

Although it was engineered out of whole cloth and constructed from concrete and soil dredged from an artificial lake and excavated for a shopping mall, Olympic Park was still a pleasant green space of refuge. I spent more time there just walking and thinking instead of taking photographs, but here are a handful of those (click on any of them to see larger ones as a slide show).