My navigation skills are infamous. I excel at being lost. Living in Los Angeles increased my sense of direction to a moderate flicker, but kicking around in a foreign playpen, these dim skills fade exponentially.
I took my bike to the dilapidated streets of Beijing with map jammed in jean pocket. For this particular adventure, the first on the bicycle, my objective was the Forbidden City. The map proved useless for the first hour. I peddled and peddled in search of clues, but struggled to put my blue dot on my map. The names on the signs were not matching the names on my map. Eventually, through magical intervention, names started syncing up. It may have taken me an hour longer than planned, but, with a splash of tenacity and street dust, I made it to the FORBIDDEN CITY.
That’s a picture for those of you that missed the top half of my face. You can spot a small chunk of the epic Forbidden City in the background. The Forbidden City is vast. I spent hours shuffling from space to space. There were moments, drinking in a courtyard or the Imperial Garden or the Hall of Supreme Harmony, where chills trickled down my neck and into my fingertips. The motive of these chills is hard to identify. Soaking in these sights through multiple senses, images flicker in the imagination. You feel faintly connected to ambiguous moments in a rich, stretching history.
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