I climbed the Great Wall of China. I stood meters away from the Maitreya Buddha statue. I toured the ruins of the Terracotta Warriors. I (pathetically) hiked Helan Mountain.
My general response? “Oh. Okay.”
At the time, I chalked my neutrality on the sightseeing portion of our great China journey up to being tired, grumpy, overwhelmed. But now? Now, I understand: I’ve seen those sites before. On TV.
Okay, so not everything we saw was on TV, but a lot of it was. It was covered by PBS or the Travel Channel or any network that covered the Olympics in Beijing in 2008. Through little effort of my own, I experienced bits and pieces of China from afar. So “afar,” in fact, that a 30-second commercial between locations seemed like an eternity in a way that I now understand the flight from Newark to Beijing to be an eternity.
My point? China was rarely a shocker for me in the way it appeared to be for others. I had seen this place before. I had laid my eyes on these people and heard their native tongue. I had salivated as they cooked their dishes and winced into my armchair as they tumbled across the gymnastics mat (Travel Channel – your programming, no matter the commercialism, is glorious in this girl’s eyes).
I had seen bits of China but I had not experienced it. Now, I have experienced it and I wonder if my twisted take on the sites is indeed twisted.
Or maybe “Oh. Okay.” is a more common response than I’ve been left to believe.
-Kristen
June 22, 2009 at 8:19 pm |
Hey, I took this photo!
And you raise a good point here, Kristen – do our mediated images of a place come to “stand in” for the actual place itself, to the point where, when we actually experience the actual place, we are left unmoved?
Huh.