This morning I stayed home sick from work. I took a half day yesterday and had a relatively peaceful late afternoon and evening in the apartment. This morning, I stepped into the shower in a pretty good mood. I had Dylan playing on my little bluetooth speaker and was feeling overall pretty good. Then I heard a really loud drilling noise that made the whole room vibrate so much that I thought it may be coming from my bathroom.
7 Months ago, I would have popped off at that and went demanding that whoever was making the noise cease immediately. However, it would seem that over the months, I have grown accustomed to regular intrusions into my personal space and repeated crossings of my personal bottom lines.
I began to entertain something absurd. What if the drill just came right out through the wall and did a little rotation in my face? Cut to the drill coming out of the wall and a man peaking his eye in the hole. No wait, this is China. He probably wouldn’t even notice he had just drilled through my shower and would have kept on drilling. Then I would have had to ask him three consecutive times to stop it please before he decided to understand me.
“Only in China”, as the co-CEO of my current company likes to say. “There are things that happen only in America, but then there are things that happen only in China and no where else in the world.” China is in your face. There situations that can be overcome in a foreign country with the simple attitude of "do as the natives do". Trouble is, I don’t even think the natives like Beijing.
To put it quite simply, there are just too many damn people. It is nearly impossible to find peace and quiet here. Not in your apartment, not at the park, not at work, not on the street. Beijing is just deafeningly loud and way too close. You can’t walk anywhere without getting cutoff. and I mean that quite literally. I can’t walk down the street for more than 5-10 minutes without getting cutoff. Every single day, on my way to work, cars swipe in front of me within a foot while I am in mid stride crossing the street with a green walk sign on the other side. Yesterday, I was crossing the street on green and a scooter nearly hit me. But they didn’t even slow down, they just said excuse me a bunch of times louder, with out making any speed adjustment other than just what they needed to not kill me.
At work, I can’t even choose to breathe non-polluted air. Last week, we had 450 AQI, and the kitchen staff had the doors to the outside wide open. The entire building was completely contaminated and our air filtration capacity, although existant, is totally inadequate. Judy had to actually wear a mask IN her office because Chinese people apparently just do not give a fuck.
I would say, on the days with the most serious air pollution, maybe 10% of the population wears a mask. Anything below hazardous, however, and they couldn’t care less. Judy said that a team of her coworkers was even playing basketball outside. When I go to the indoor gym, I have the same problem with people opening the windows on days above 200 AQI. I mean really, they could not care less.
So how about getting away from it all? Maybe a nice vacation is in order. Well, last week, during National Day, Judy and I tried to take a taxi to a place where we could ride a boat down a mountain. We went up the freeway north. We began to see big trucks parked on the road to the right side. Other drivers who were turning around because of the apparently stopped traffic up ahead were driving on our side of the road in a makeshift lane coming at us. It went on like this for miles. Truck after truck…just sitting there. We still hadn’t gotten it quite figured out yet when the cab driver told us that these same people had been stuck in traffic when he came up this road, YESTERDAY.
We turned around and tried another route with the same result. Then, we tried the mountain route. No luck. We just gave up and decided to head to a section of the great wall that was nearby.
Of course, the wall is packed with wall to wall people. When trying to climb up 45 degree angle sections of the wall, you still have to deal with the impoverished sense of navigating space that the Chinese have. They observe no safety rules, walk on whatever side they want, run up the stairs and down them and stop whenever and wherever they please. You just don’t get a break from it.
The next day we tried a park called Fragrant Mountain. There was a long hike to the peak and every. single. step. of the way…there were people packing every square foot of the path. Sitting, standing at junctions, people selling cucumbers, water bottles, and popsicles. And endless stream of people. Every where, anywhere, all the time. Beijing.
Cab drivers blocking bus stops, people cutting you off in line, waiting for security checks at subways. Walls surrounding every establishment, walls built in the middle of sidewalks. No reason and no rhyme. Beijing.
People singing in the subways the streets and the trains, waiters talking real loudly in restaurants. Polluting the air and your ears and the streams, the smog it is thick. Beijing.
There is no common sense in Beijing, only nonsense. And it is time for Sloppy to GET OUT OF BEIJING!
Judy and I have decided to move back to Taiwan in December…and not a moment to soon!
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| The drive to fragrant mountain. |
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| 450 AQI |
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| More pollution shots |
