Tiananmen Square

7th, 12th August 2004.

During the Cultural Revolution, Chairman Mao created lots of pavements in the centre of Beijing.  This enabled him to him wear his red arm band and watch thousands of people parade past him. Tiananmen Square is a national symbol.  It is therefore very busy, and full of tourists who like to have their photos taken with people like us.

We meet Lee and his family. Lee is clearly in need of a haircut.

The boys haven't seen each other for a while, and it had been quite a morning (what with the incident outside the hotel) so they pretended to be Chinese tourists.  Ross is the only one taking the picture seriously.

There are lots of police everywhere.  This became frustrating with so many areas roped off, it was like negotiating a maze to get from one side to the other.

Big Brother is also watching.

Confused kids.

Confused adults.

The man on the left appears to of wedgied himself and is slapping some random local.

The entrance to Maos mausoleum (which was roped-off incidentally) is graced by this sovietesque sculture of the communism version of the dream-team. Complete with pilots, bureaucrats, scholars and other ordinary Marxist-Stalinists.

If either of those two were around today we would put them in the a plane with George W and the rest of the dream team and send them off to Iraq.
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