Celebrity Special Edition - White Beard, Red China

Without further delay, I am glad to introduce our first celebrity guest to Blonde Hair, Red China! A recent guest of mine, I have ask them to share their thoughts on this Communist country. He's saved lives, he's raised 4 kids, and he hasn't shaved his beard in 40 years..I bring you the eloquent thoughts of Mr. John B. Muuuuuueeellller:


"What you say here is so true.  China feels different. looks different and is different.  On arriving I was overwhelmed by the sense of disconnect I had with everyone around me.  I didn't know what all these people were thinking about when they got up in the morning and I had trouble attributing my set of values/motivations into there heads.   Maybe it was jet lag, but I was intrigued about what appeared to be a billion smiling faces,  Shop keepers, streetside vendors, the young men and women dressed in their white shirts and black suits on there way to work, they all appeared to be smiling and I didn't get it.  Did it come from the Buddah that sits in the temple up on the hill built by thousands of laborer that dumped the dirt by the bucketfull from the bottom of the lake they were building for the emperor.  I saw no reflection of religion on the streets that would suggest this.  Was it the sunshine that was present my week of visiting?  I had been told that Beijing could be cold and the sky grey.   Or was it simply that everyone knew that, as a whole, they are better off today then they were 15 years ago and the sense of national success just infuses the fabric of everyday life.   Is what I saw a bubble of prosperity waiting to burst.

The cynic in me would suggest that I was shown a false front.   After a few days in Beijing I considered the possibility that the Chinese government, as they prepared for the 2008 Olympics,  may have taken lessons from management down in Orlando  and I was still seeing the benefits of that effort.  The tourists spots are  painted, the gardens along the streets are planted, the weeds are gone, trash is out of sight  and the streets have been kept clean.  The only thing missing was Micky.  But as I said, that may be the cynic in me speaking.

The Chinese appear to have succeeding in learning the lessons of marketing 101.   Let me digress a moment and reflect on learning to ski.  Years ago, we took the kids to colorado to ski.  The mountain where we went had  a ski lift and you had to walk about 300 yards from the parking lot to the base of the lift before you could start your day.  Along the path there was a wooden structure "the ski school" , a place to rent skis and a small cafeteria.  That is all you needed because we were there to go skiing.   The walk was long but it was pretty and thru some woods and over a creek and it was about the outdoors.

Now, when we go back,  the walk is lined with condominiums, high end sporting good stores, small cafes and coffee shops as well as western themed artists gallery's and boutique clothing stores.  At the end of the walk you get to the same ski lift and mountain, but the experience is different.

What does this have to do with China you might ask.  Well China like the ski resort has placed the commercial activities front and center.  When we went to the great wall to hike along the mountainous ridges, be found the same things we found outside our mountain back home.  At the base of the mountain, there was a recently built paved road, lined with recently built cafes and shops selling art, and food and the exact same China memorabilia we found in Xi'an or the forbidden city.  The great wall hasn't changed in the last 30 years, but the experience has.  Buying a Teeshirt that declares "I hiked the great wall"  no longer seemed appealing, the adventure is gone.  Beijing was very similar.  We walked thru Tiananmen square past Mao's mausoleum and the great hall of the people to a market.  Beijing is known for these markets and we were going to one of the oldest commercial markets in the city, Qianmen Dajie.   This ancient street is lined by  quaint "hutangs", small alleys along the outside the neighborhoods of walled-off courtyards and homes or along the outside walls of ancient monasteries and parks and temples.  The alleys are a hotbed of commerce that  sell everything you need.  Shoes, dumplings, food on a stick, shirts and scarves, hats and gloves.  

As we walked along the dajie we stopped at a a small restaurant and looked at the shops that lined the street as we approached the hutang.  As I sat there I looked at the stores,  there was H&M, Nike Express, Rolex and other names I recognized all in English lettering above the Chinese Characters.  And I even found Micky, not the Orlando Micky with the big ears, but MickyD selling his big macs to the world.  I finished my drink and Celeste captured the moment, a weary traveling seeking comfort in an exotic locale.

 I started out suggesting that I didn't know what was going on inside the minds of everyone I saw, but once I arrived home and the fog of travel lifted, I had a better perspective on what I was experiencing.  The discordance I felt was mine.  Meeting my friends and coworkers I realized that I knew what was on the minds of those billion smiling faces, it was the same thing that was behind the faces here at home.  Experiencing China was like taking a Rorschach test.  What you see or don't see says more about the observer then what is being observed.   It is both a window to the world outside as well as an entry to the world within.  Most of all it is a window worth looking thru."