Beijing

So how does the capital compare to other Asian cities i have been to like Delhi, Ho Chi Minh, Singapore, Hanoi, Bangkok. All of which are on my - yes i would love to go back - list.

Its big. Any city that has six (yes 6) ring roads is big. Everywhere you go you see lots of high rise apartment blocks and that means a lot of people. But there are not hoards of people on pavements or coming out of metro stations, they are not hanging on the outside of buses, there are not thousands of scooters or tut tuts. So where are they? They are in cars, lots of them. To be fair roads are very wide, lots of dual carriageways with 3/4 lanes either side. But this is a second gear city because the volume of cars is immense. I have only skirted around LA but i guess it is similar.

Scale means that despite being here three days i have still not got my bearings, cant quit understand how it fits together. I have seen amazing historical sites similar to those other cities (well perhaps not the case in Singapore) but i have not found its soul. That means at some stage i need to come back, not because i have fallen in love with the city but because i don't really know it. I need to give it some more time to flirt before i  can decide whether i have fallen for it. That just me, always playing hard to get.