Weekend Pursuits

All the other urban planning students here from USC and UCLA have been raving about the Beijing Urban Planning Museum, so we finally went. Apparently, every major city in China has a planning museum, but Shanghai’s is the best, and Beijing’s is among the best. The life of a planner or architect is so different in China; you definitely would never lack for work.

Anyways, the highlight of the planning museum is the scale model of Beijing. There’s a photo below. You can walk around the perimeter and it’s really detailed. We were even able to locate our apartment building. The other highlight for us was this hilarious cartoon video of a musical public service announcement about transportation. It’s about 3 minutes long, and basically a little girl sings about how it’s best to use public transportation during the week and your car on the weekends, how you should drive courteously and safely, and how together we’ll build a better, modern Beijing. My description just doesn’t do it justice. The thing is, in Beijing, and really all of China, there are public slogans everywhere. Most are quite short, some are very strident, some are relentlessly cheery, but what one is most struck by is the ubiquity. They’re just everywhere. It’s a somewhat blunt instrument, but you wonder what life in the U.S. would be like if we had more positive public service announcements. Would we be nicer to each other? Would we have more of a sense of community? Or would the slogans just be ignored or mocked?

Our other weekend activity was to go to Chuandixia, a Ming dynasty-era family village outside of Beijing. After a nearly interminable bus ride, we arrived at this village perched on a mountainside. It’s basically a tourist village now, but the architecture is well preserved and you could tell by looking at the villagers that they are still mostly one large family clan. Kind of fun to see especially given that the day before we had read about how 95 of Mitt Romney’s relatives are helping him out in his Iowa campaign. Me being an only child and Peter being the son of two only children, that sort of extended family size is staggering. The village had lots of lovely in-home restaurants, a little temple, and lovely views.