My “Beijing trip post,” but not really.
This was my first time going to China, since, no, I do not count Taiwan. I took 300+ photos but only liked less than 1/3 of them-go figure. But most of the best parts of my trip were being alone at the Summer Palace, Great Wall, etc., and taking pictures. I haven’t done anything “creative” in so long, but I felt alive and more like myself while just taking in everything around me and thinking about composition and such. The rest of my pictures are at flickr.
Somehow by traveling to Beijing, a foreign country, I was struck by the realization that I’d been living in another one-Japan-for the past year and a half already. Ever since them, I’ve been feeling how quickly things have been moving. In Beijing, I was stressed by not knowing how to act around my parents’ friends (they were kind of enough to offer to let me stay at their home, but this was the first time I’d met them!) and being dropped in a new environment that was full of polluted air and gross bathrooms but also an amazing amount of beauty. And while I was taking hundreds of pictures and trying really hard not to get cheated by taxi drivers (I failed) or get my purse stolen (didn’t happen!), in-tune with the start of the new year, I was wondering, “What the fuck is going on with my life?”
I had a lot more that I was bursting to tell people when I first got back, but now I’m already out of Beijing mode and into “What the hell am I going to do about my life?” mode. Sometimes your life takes on a daily routine, but then it’s suddenly interrupted by a blast of something like the end of the year, a trip somewhere that pulls you out of your comfort zone, time to think about who you are.
I don’t really want to talk about Beijing to you right now-I think it’ll take a lot more time for me to reorganize my thoughts, and right now I’d rather do other things. But Beijing-China-is amazing. I knew it was all there, but I was amazed anyway to see that this city could have all that it does. A new friend I made there mentioned that people don’t tend to immediately take to Beijing, but really, there is nowhere like Beijing. And nowhere like Tokyo, where my home is right now. No matter where I am, I always feel myself being pulled towards other places, and other people, but I am incredibly blessed because there is also something wonderful about having multiple homes, multiple places to care about, and people to love scattered across the world. (Never forget about me, and I will do the same for you.)
(The Forbidden City, the Summer Palace, and the Great Wall)
Originally published at enyi.org. You can comment here or there.