Concrete Jungle

Every day I walk about a mile and a half to go to my university campus. It takes me about thirty minutes to go this distance. Most people take some speedy way of transportation to get to school, but I prefer to walk. On this mile and a half stretch of road one can see all of Beijing summed up in a nutshell.

I start off from my place at 7:40 every morning. As soon as I step out the door, the air of the cold, cement stairwell hits me. It’s like breathing in fumes of burning coal. The temperature is usually below freezing in the morning this time of year so I wear a lot of clothing. The cold and the air just bite at you to get walking faster.

I pass out the gate of the apartment complex and turn right onto the sidewalk. I just continue walking straight all the way to my school. The sidewalk is very wide and allows for easy moving. People will mostly walk on it, but lots of bikes, motorcycles, and cars take to the sidewalks for shortcuts around road traffic sometimes. People won’t hesitate to park cars in the middle of the sidewalks either. The first two months I was here in Beijing, a brand new sidewalk was built all the way from my place to the school. There used to be holes and loose bricks everywhere, so it’s much nicer now. The new sidewalk has already been well worn in. I usually walk with my eyes scanning the ground in front of me so I can dodge the freezing spit and mucus and other trash on the ground. My friend told me Beijing is one of the dirtiest cities in the world. I wasn’t too sure, but sometimes it really seems that way. Chinese people have some of the dirtiest habits, especially spitting everywhere.

I usually see some of the same people walking in the mornings, but there really are so many people here. The street vendors are always out carting around roasted chestnuts, which taste like dirt, and other fruits and breakfast snacks. Sometimes I see the horse drawn carts coming in from the countryside carrying various building materials or vegetables. There are usually about six horses, each pulling a cart loaded with supplies and a few farmers. They just go along with the cars and bicycles. I pass by the next apartment complex, where lots of foreigners live. The illegal taxis hang out here to mooch off the foreigners’ money. They stopped asking if I wanted a ride a long time ago though. The drivers just stand out in the cold most of the day smoking and playing Chinese chess under the bridge.

The migrant workers are usually scuffling around in their big, green army coats. Lots of older people wear aged military outfits that aren’t used anymore, which gives a really communist feeling in contrast to the more stylish, young people’s clothing. There are usually about three homeless people that lay on the freezing sidewalk all day begging for money. I don’t know how they can actually survive sometimes. The trash collectors come riding along in the morning too. They usually ride a bicycle with a little motor and a cart on the back and they’ll pack as much stuff onto it as possible. It’s unbelievable how much they can get onto their little carts sometimes. I’ve seen a few piles of bags stacked almost ten feet tall and strapped on with ropes. They just ride along with their big tower of trash swaying back and forth. There are a lot of things going on along the road, and it’s very loud and smoggy sometimes. People honk their horns all the time here and won’t think twice about honking their horn right in your face.

Most of the people are on their way to work of course. Grandmothers are usually taking their grandchildren to school. The grandmothers ride their bikes and the little kids just sit on the back holding on tight as they weave through traffic. The Korean students are usually speeding to school on their mopeds, and the salary workers are either running after a bus or hailing a cab. The elderly people usually walk in the mornings and sometimes bring their dogs for a stroll.

This piece of street gives a good impression of most of Beijing. The whole city is pretty much gray, dirty, and loud, especially in the winter. It’s sometimes named the “concrete jungle” by foreigners because of its wild and dismal atmosphere.


A Chinese Christmas

Along with capitalism and commercialism comes Santa Claus to the cities of China. Some Chinese people like to try and celebrate for Christmas. They just don’t really know how. I think most people believe Christmas to be on the 24th of December. One of my American friends had an argument with a Chinese person that thought Christmas Eve was actually Christmas day. I was out on Christmas Eve and the streets and restaurants were busy through the night with revelry. Some people had a little too much excitement I think. On Christmas morning the streets were marked with a rare silence and frozen barf. I get the feeling most Chinese people can’t hold their alcohol very well. Lots of shops and restaurants had some basic Christmas decorations and carols to welcome customers too. All the workers wore Santa hats for the time before Christmas. The image of Christmas in Beijing that stuck most is the random old guy on his moped smoking his cigarette with a big frown on his face and wearing a big, red Santa hat.

Spit On What?

Chinese people really like to spit. It’s so bad, the Chinese government has to put up signs and remind people not to spit on the ground. Most young generations don’t have such a habit though. Except for the nicer places in downtown Beijing, you will always see people spit on the ground. They always first clear their throats really loudly and sometimes obnoxiously before they stain the ground with their mucus bombs. I don’t really know why people always spit. Lots of old, senile people just like to spit whenever foreigners walk by to express their feelings.

I always eat lunch with one of my Chinese friends at my school’s dining hall. One day we were eating lunch, and I had to spit out some meat that had a piece of cartilage in it. I put it back on my plate and he said that was really disgusting to put it back on my plate. I asked him what I should do if I need to spit out some bad food. He said to me that it would be much more sanitary to spit out food onto the table or on the floor. He said it was more sanitary because nobody eats food off the table or the floor, but the plate should not be touched by any germs from somebody’s mouth. I thought that was really weird, but an interesting cultural difference.


Things have been really slow here lately. The recent earthquake knocked out my internet, but it speeds up a little bit everyday. I had some photos to show with this post, but my connection is still too slow to upload them. I have two weeks of school left now. I plan to leave for vacation on January 16th. I'll start by going to Tibet for about a week, then to Sichuan, Yunnan, and Guangxi Provinces for the next three or four weeks. Look forward to a lot of stories from my travels.

China: Transformation Or Mutation?

China is truly going through a major transformation and I am starting to believe most Chinese people are having a hard time keeping up with the quick change. Beijing is full of contrasts: new, decrepit; rich, poor; knowledge, ignorance; traditional, and modern. Most people here over the age of forty are still scarred by the hard times of the Cultural Revolution and seem to still carry a heavy burden from those times. Half of Beijing seems to be filled with people still living in the past and not accepting the future. The younger generations are now adapting to the modern China though, but most young Chinese still grew up in a very different time and place. Through my friends and host family I’ve been able to see part of this transformation from old to new Chinese lifestyle.

The father of the household, where I live, is a thirty year old, college educated IT specialist, who grew up in Hebei province near Beijing. I think he’s a good example of how Chinese people are adapting to the new China. When he returns from his work, he can often be seen coming in the door with his laptop and hanging up his coat and pants before setting down for dinner. My friend says I live with a “real” Chinese family because the father will just take off his pants in the living room because he says it’s a bit warm in the house. His apartment has a personal computer in one corner, a nice, large flat screen TV in the center, and a little statue of Mao Zedong to top it all off. It seems like the flat screen TV is becoming an important asset to the modern Chinese family. I don’t think they’ve given much thought to their interior design either, and things are usually left messy for the maid to clean up later. Sometimes it’s like they’re still living on the farm. To some foreigners here they just can’t quite understand why Chinese people still act this way and it maybe doesn’t fit their definition of “civilized.” Chinese people use the things they have in a different way from most Western people. They usually just don’t know how to take advantage of the “modern” lifestyle the way most foreigners do, and just live the same way they have always known.

Most of my Chinese friends have had college education yet they still know very little about the rest of the world. I was having dinner with the family this week and the grandmother asked if all foreigners ate with chopsticks. The father didn’t really know either and we started naming every country we knew where people used chopsticks. He seemed surprised when I told him Europeans did not use them, and Japanese people did. If you ask most Chinese people about a foreign country you’ll probably just get a very textbook answer. If somebody talks about Americans, they will almost certainly mention Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Nixon, Clinton, Bush, and Bill Gates. This week, my Chinese friend said he really admired Clinton because he thought he was really tall like Yao Ming. He said he really liked Nixon too because he met with Mao Zedong to mend relations between the US and China. He said he really didn’t like Bush because he attacked Iraq. He said he admired Mao the most of all, and admired Chou Enlei the second most even though he probably didn’t know Chou Enlei was marked as a traitor to Mao and killed by Mao’s Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution. Fabricated history is just annoying because it makes everyone sound like a hypocrite or just dumb.