A different shade of grey

Beijing feels different to Shanghai. Twelve hours north on the sleeper and the temperature has halved. Leaving behind the 30 degrees-plus of steamy, sticky Shanghai we shivered as we stepped out into bracing Beijing, the thermometer struggling to reach 14 degrees in the pale light of morning.

It feels distinctively autumnal up here. Inside the air con is off and the extra blankets are on, outside the leaves have started to curl up and expire, falling lightly onto the pavements. The hot yam seller is doing brisk business and the sun sighs and packs it in well before people have got home for dinner.

The sun is often a vague presence here, lending the city a strange light. It doesn’t tend to blaze away but rather seems to seep through the thin clouds, bathing everything it touches in a soft light - a photographer‘s light perhaps, where lines are defined and colours aren’t washed out.

The colours themselves are strange. In Beijing the predominant colour is grey. This isn’t anything new on our travels - we found Japanese cities overwhelmingly grey. But somehow this hue is different. A different shade of grey - a grey that glows. Sounds like a subtitle for John Major's autobiography.

It goes nicely with China’s favourite colour - red. Since it is considered to be the luckiest colour red is the colour of anything on which people which to bring success. Our hostel must surely be the luckiest place in town, for it is swathed in red, from the carpets underfoot to the lanterns hanging from the ceiling.

Tucked away up a little alleyway, we have spent a pleasurable week in this hostel, holed up in a hutong.

The traditional houses of which hutongs are comprised are almost fortress-like in their design, set around a sheltered courtyard, protected by high walls and guarded by a sturdy pair of doors spanning an archway which leads onto the street.

Hutongs have been much mentioned in the many lead-up pieces to the Olympics, cited as an example of the changing face of the host city where the old alleyways and courtyards have been bulldozed to make way for skyscrapers.

And whilst this is true in many parts of the city it doesn’t appear to be happening here.

Rather life seems to carry on as it has for centuries, with clichés straight out of a travel guide encountered at every corner. Life is so rich and boisterous, so vivid and garrulous, that we struggle to take it all in as we cycle through the streets.

Out on the main street a man sits outside the steamed dumpling shop singing to himself, while next door girls in facemasks serve pastries to a heaving mass of impatient customers.

A grimy-faced fellow heaves an old tricycle along, stacked high with old cardboard boxes while electric bikes zip past him, weaving between the trolley buses.

A wrinkled old lady sits on the pavement, flogging off old factory cast-offs, t-shirts and hair accessories from a sheet spread out over the pavement. She sits amidst the detritus of a hundred hurried kebab meals, their pointed sticks and scraps of meat littering the pavement.

Large crowds sweep the pavements clear of bystanders, traffic fights its way along the street, and everywhere there is noise noise noise.

Off the main street, down a maze of little alleyways we happen across our local market. Prices are lower here, foreigners are scarce. We pass a cavernous fish and meat market, its air pungent and floors slippery underfoot, haggle at ramshackle hardware stalls, and weave between mountains of fruit and veg.

Behind the tea merchant’s stall a young boy pees between parked bicycles. An old fellow shuffles past, dressed in his pyjamas, a lady hawks fruit and tends to her offspring, playing in the heaps of oranges, lychees and watermelons.

Grease monkeys tend to broken bikes on the spot, their owners patiently waiting for a quick patch-up, and young girls compete at their pastry stalls, vying for the endless current of passing customers.

Around the market, in the hutongs themselves, the scene could have been painted onto the front of a packet of tea: respectable ladies walking their Pekingnese; old man decked out in Mao jackets; caged birds singing outside cafes while inside men play cards amidst a pall of smoke.

On our trusty bikes, we pootled deeper into the labyrinth of narrow streets, weaving between other cyclists, ancient old tricycles, groups of man engrossed in strange board games, large queues outside Mongolian barbequed meat stands, kids playing in the streets, mothers hawking DVDs of obscure Chinese war movies…

It went on and on, long after we had returned to our own little piece of the hutong, and turned in for the night, safe behind its big wooden doors.

Who said grey is dull?