When you exit the station immediately you notice two things; persistent taxi drivers and polluted air. There are industrial chemical plants and mountains on one side of Beijing and sea on the other.
Beijing is modern, huge, highly populated, political capital of China.
All industrial waste entering the atmosphere is blown in by the wind from the sea and gets trapped by the mountains and remains in the city.
I was told that an average day in Beijing air pollution is five times higher than the standard of safety set out by the WTO.
In some places Beijing resembles Soviet era from the 80’s photos, square tall houses with small windows and granite facades. Broad, polished clean, empty streets, all this creates a sharp contrast in difference between Beijing and Hong Kong or Shanghai.
China was the place I desired to visit most, more than any other Asian country. But since the preparation of documents for my visa, I realised that it would not be so easy. Before I went to China I was also concerned that the Chinese can be very inhospitable to visitors.
All my ideas about Chinese hostility faded away on the second day, when people started approaching me, touching my skin, and watching me eating. They were asking where I am from and why I do not speak Chinese.
Some Chinese really do not care about the whites, they just doing their usual thing – sleeping anywhere they find appropriate.
The 70th anniversary celebration of the end of the Second World War and victory over Japan was held in the city. China lost 20 million people fighting the Japanese in WWII and many here believe the island nation has yet to fully apologise for the genocide during that time, as did Germany.
Chinese people really have something to celebrate, they raise their patriotic spirit by painting their faces with flags and wearing strange flower clips in their hair.
Children playing with a strange wooden chip thing that clicks and rolls over.
The lion is the symbol of power and authority, so China in general is full of sculptures. Although there were no lions in China ever.
Beijingers say that the air is polluted also because of the number of vehicles on the roads. Here the sun looks like this.
Some sort of the lottery is carried out in Beijing everyday, where cars with certain registered license plates are chosen to be banned from going on the road the next day. This is reported to the owner of the car in person and printed in the newspapers to make everyone else aware. If the owner of that license plate goes on the road the next day he faces a fine. This is done to reduce the amount of traffic and CO2 emissions. It’s for this reason that wealthy Chinese own two cars.
For those who do not have a car, but have wheels, there are separate roads or fenced off lanes. In Beijing scooters, bicycles and pedestrians often use one track.
The good thing in Beijing is that the scooters run on electricity or gas. It’s good for two reasons; less noise and lower CO2 emissions. The bad thing about the electric scooters is that they are so quiet that pedestrians don’t hear them and so there is another problem – beeping scooters. Because of this some areas have started introducing no-beeping signs. I heard that problem is solved in electric cars in the U.S. with speakers that simulate the sound of the motor.
If you don’t own any wheels you take metro.
Overall Beijing seemed a fairly plain and uninteresting town to me.
