A walk through a hutong

Well, quite a few hutong actually. It seems the area around the centre of the city, around Tianenmen Square is quite flat. There is plenty of high rise but it is spread out around this flat area. What there is instead are the hutong, old residential areas of narrow lanes with one story houses all crammed in next to each other.

It is hard to tell how well off the people living there are. In some places the walls were a bit shoddy, there was rubbish and dirt, there were cheap... things. But there was also a surprising number of cars (some quite nice too) and some of the buildings were well made and well maintained. But then I think back to all the public toilets there were - there are no toilets in the dwellings. So, it seems that these are mostly poorer areas but not necessarily always.

It was good to get off the campus and go for a bit of an explore. I took the subway (although on this line it was all above ground) the long way around to the other side of the inner city and walked West through the historical hutong area. I did a lot of walking. When I started there were no foreigners - there was only locals going about their daily lives. I'm actually quite impressed by how little I was stared at.

Then I came to the Bell Tower and Drum tower which are reasonably touristy places. I wasn't planning on doing touristy things but they were worth a look and had good views over the surrounding area, which is why I can tell you the centre of the city is flat and the high rise offices and appartments form a ring around it.

Further West from there there is an area obviously a bit more travelled by tourists. I was more regularly accosted by rickshaw drivers trying to convince me that I should take their hutong tour. Sorry, I just did one...

I have photos but can't work out how to access them. When I plugged in my cammera it was recognised by the computer and a dialog box came up asking me to go through a series of steps... all in Chinese. Does anyone know Windows 2000 well enough to tell me what to do, without being able to read the questions?