Today being a beautiful day in the ‘jing, I thought of nothing better than a long hutong ramble, a bit of urban hiking if you will. We started at Xinjiekou, wormed our way through the Sihuan wet market, around Houhai,* down Gulou Dongdajie (stopping for burritos at Amigos), and then south along Jiaodaokou to the National Museum of Art, and then further south still…and that’s where our springtime stroll turned interesting.
I had — perhaps naively — assumed that since no protests materialized last Sunday, and the overwhelming security response had brought so much attention to a non-issue, that this Sunday would be comparatively mellow. A few cops, some red armbands, but mostly just NPC bullshit and nothing like the street sweepers and broom beaters of last Sunday’s debacle on Wangfujing.
Yep, I was wrong.
We made it past the first checkpoint, just north of the cathedral, by putting on the ‘dumb laowai’ act. Since most cops assume foreigners are idiots anyway, this ruse is not too hard to pull off. After a few “We don’t know anything we just want to look at the church, Mr. Police Officer” lines, we were through…only to be stopped just north of the