There is the mile long laundry list of facts that you already know, the largest number of people gathered within a single border (and still hankering for Taiwan), the harnessing of all that human energy into the fastest moving economy on earth, the construction boom for the Olympics that some people have estimated is the largest construction project undertaken by humans since, well, the Great Wall. The view from the taxi didn't make the place seem any smaller.
Tianjin looked a lot like Cleveland. Our little red taxi tore out from the ferry terminal and onto a six lane freeway barrelling straight through a landscape of crumbling concrete and hobbling industry. This landscape unfolded in front of our eyes, unending, unchanging, for over an hour, the highway we rode charging on dead straight, without a curve or a flinch to acknowledge anything lesser than itself.
Like Cleveland the population seemed completely unphased by the wide aprons of concrete. Men in tweed jackets and women in faded heels sauntered through several lanes of traffic to reach the small city of fruit vendors that had set up shop underneath the concrete pylons of the freeway. The city was falling apart but the cheap white shirts were flat and pressed, the dresses on the women still clean and bright.
=
I had met a Dutch traveller from the Netherlands on the ferry, and we decided to share a room for the night. Everyone else had hurried past Tianjin, making the hour or two farther to Beijing, but Robert and I were intruiged by this massive anonymous city, which had somehow made itself the third largest in the country without anyone really noticing.
By evening every other building on the street outside of our room had lit up in neon, each one hoping to draw your eyes to the stadium size dining rooms that you could see through the windows. Every pore on the diners faces brought out by stark hospital lighting. These alternated with the dark gray concrete faces of banks. Walking up and down the street we counted over a dozen just on the single block, some of them two branches of the same bank, just across the street from one another. When we asked the owner of the hostel we stayed in about the number of banks he just looked at us quizzically. "I'm not sure," he said, smiling and shrugging it off casually.
Our room was on the eighth floor, the hostel just being a large apartment with a few extra rooms. Like the wrinkle free clothes we'd seen among the crumbling concrete, the apartment was a spotlessly tended bit of private space among the smoggy buildings. Immaculate wooden floors, a wide screen television. The toilets and the sinks were kissed with a little gray bit of script that said "American Standard." We fell asleep on wooden poster beds, Snoopy sheets draped in the pale neon from the restaurants, the air thick with the symphony of bleats, horns and protests of the ceaseless traffic.