Reporting LIVE from Beijing Capital Airport

Was an interesting time getting here. With all of my luggage broken, I have been hauling around 52 kg in my hands and shoulders--mostly hands. I sucked it up and took a cab out of the apartment I borrowed to Dongzhimen Zhan, the most inner-city stop of the new Airport Express subway. I told the taxi driver to go to Dongzhimen, but he said "with all that luggage, youre going to the airport. I'll take you right there! Very convenient."
I said "no, I don't have that much money."
"What? You're a foreigner! Of course you have the money! Only 70, 80 kuai!"
"I'm about to go back to the US! I'm carrying very little RMB!" (This was a lie).
"Alright, how much is in your wallet? Maybe I'll make you a deal."
"No, no, it's fine. Dongzhimen."
"Come on, you want to go to the airport."
"No, I told you where I want to go. Dongzhimen."
"Airport."
"I mean it, Dongzhimen. I'll break (I didn't know the word for "rip") my money before I give it to you if you take me to the airport."
"You're joking!"
"Not at all."
"Alright, fine. You're crazy, foreigner. Now hurry up and get out of my cab."

Luckily, we were laughing the whole time. He was awesome.

Anyway, I then haul all my junk downstairs to the airport line, where I get a ticket for a cool 25 kuai, and get on, already drenched in sweat. Luckily, the airport line is excellently modern, and air-conditioned.

After a short trip underground, it shoots up into the sky, and one gets a sense for just how fast he is going (the answer, or course: pretty fast).

When we arrived, I stepped out onto the terminal, and got to see the twinkly lights of Beijing disappear for the last time in a long time.

I got into the terminal, and they checked my bags for bomb residue looooong before I got to ticketing, which was interesting. They are really worried.

And now, I am sitting here, not yet checked in, waiting for my flight. All ticketing is closed, and was closed at 11, when I arrived, which I found... odd. It doesn't even open 'till 5:30 (a few people have already offered me hotels for the night, but little do they know: I'm not on Communist Time anymore, I'm on Freedom Time, so I will be staying up all night long!).

I thought it was quite odd for an airport as massive as Beijing's to only be ticketing 2/3 of the day, then realised: I'm in Terminal 3, which is new. And if the Beijing Government is smart, they are planning for growth, and Terminal 3 might actually be larger than it needs to be. Which would be brilliant, but it means that no coffee shop is open 'till 6 and I have to sit out in the loser section for the next 5 hours or so.

Lame.

I was hoping to have pictures for you guys, but my pirated bandwidth just can't handle it, so they'll come later.

See you in Shanghai!

--Comrade Erik

Fireworks in Beijing

No, no pictures.

We heard some impromptu repetitive bangs outside, and figured nobody was getting shot, but we were still curious. What we saw were very low fireworks, of the smaller variety that one might see at a 4th of July festival.

It was pretty awesome, but we wondered two things: 1) Where are the police? There were dozens of apartment blocks within a few hundred feet, and this was actually pretty darn dangerous. 2) Isn't one of those things going to blow up on the ground?

Then it did.

But the impromptu show continued, either because the fuses had already been lit, or because everyone was okay. But it still looked a bit scary.

One Last "Screw You" To My Travels.

Well, no matter how many things go bad between here and sitting over the Pacific Ocean, my own country is going to be the last place to screw me before I am home. Turns out, they can take my laptop for no reason at all, on a whim! Even if they don't, I will still be irked at the drool on their pants from seeing a pretty Mac Book float by that they know they could just pluck up if they wanted.

Thanks, America, for making travel awesome.

Bomb Scare on Beijing Subway

No, it didn't happen to me, but it's still interesting.

A fellow traveler in China was on the #1 line today, and at a station, while the doors stood open, everyone started screaming and ran. Nobody knew why, or who started it, but it was panic and mayhem. The police apparently responded moderately well, yelling at people to all get upstairs and out of the station right away. Regardless of what's going on, if there is panic, you want to get people to fresh air and open spaces so they can feel distant from the source of the unknown panic, and so they can have time to relax.

Turns out there was an apparent bomb scare. The police did not explain it, but it might be a Xinjiang separatist, or something. We talked about how often this stuff happens--and it turns out, we have no idea. The Beijing government does _not_ publicize this stuff in the papers, so it could happen every few months, or have been happening daily (though we would likely be hearing more rumors to the effect if the latter were true). We also don't know how serious the threat was--people hung outside for about 20 minutes, but that could have just meant a very thorough check of the trains, which is the right response.

So all in all, I'm pretty glad I'm leaving Beijing soon. Bomb scares are just the last thing I want.

Art Gallery

This weekend included a trip to a modern art gallery, called 798, in Northeast Beijing. The site was an old factory area that got bought/reclaimed/traded with political favors/or some other sort of crazy Chinese economic mumbo-jumbo to a coalition of art dealers that kept part of the factory's name (it was, of course, Factory 798 back in the day). The coolest part was probably actually seeing all of the old factory stuff, including an abandoned train-fueling station with a coal-burning engine sitting idle on the tracks.

I picked a wonderful day to forget my camera, but Zephyr's phone (Zephyr is a coworker of mine) got a few noteworthy shots:

The first is one of a few slogans painted on the factory walls during either the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution. Workers actually probably painted them voluntarily, in their fervor of the moment.
"Long live the great Chinese Communist Party!"

A picture of me, about 20 feet up on a tracked crane, looking down. Also, for some reason, black and white. Who knows.


This sculpture is modern, made in 2007 by one of the modern artists, but in the style of a Culutral Revolution poster. The worker (with his eight-inch-thick forearms, a trademark of the time) is holding a brush, showing that anyone can be an artist if endowed with formiddable forearms and Chairman Maozedong thought. The interesting thing bout this sculpture was the quality of the medium--the iron-based metal used to make it was not only rusted, but it was of an inconsistent grade, and cracked in certain parts where the alloy had not settled, bubbled a bit, and generally looked bad. I realised with perfect clarity after a few moments of thinking--this abandoned factory, I am sure, at some point had vast wasteful expanses of pig iron or half-attempts at steel made in the backyard furnaces of peasants during the Great Leap Forward, shipped in on those coal trains, and then rejected in disgust by the marginally-more-qualified engineers of the factory. The artist almost certainly got his sculpting materials from such an industrial graveyard, and not simply because they were free, but because they represented the result of the thought of the time.


Some of the paintings were strange, some were beautiful, but some actually got to make powerful statements about China's past--the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and the general behavior of great leaders like Mao Zedong. Some of the political satires were a bit chilling, especially those of the Cultural Revolution. Zephyr and I had a brief discussion on the different realms in which one can discuss Chinese history and policy, and apparently some history is open to China's very small ivory tower. But there was no word of the Tiananmen Square incident.

When I mentioned that, Zephyr said "nobody worries about it anymore, it's history!" I got a bit confused, and said "well, why do you worry about the Japanese so much? That's 65-year-old history." Which got me a jumbled response about Japanese attitudes about it today, but I got a small mark of admission when I asked "if nobody worries about it, why aren't you allowed to talk about it?"

I then told her why China's banned art was so popular in the US. If a single piece of art is so powerful as to threaten the security of the largest authoritarian government in the world, then it must really have something to say.

Time to be Patriotic!

Friday, exactly 2 weeks before the Olympics begin, Chinese flags went up outside of practically every storefront in China. Very cute.

In addition, "Beijing 2008 Welcomes You" junk went up inside the hotel part of my apartment.

It's not that the government is forcing any of these folks to put these up with physical guns pointed at them. I'm sure nobody will actually be arrested if they refuse. But they sure as heck didn't have any flags up before Friday, anywhere. I'm wondering if the Chinese government had to exercize any levers on its people to make them do it--or whether China has been so twisted by guilt to do what they are told for so long that it's just automatic these days.

Fire Motorcycle

I wish I had gotten my camera for this. I saw a bright red motorcycle flying by on the street, with flashing lights, and wondered what the heck it was, until I saw the Chinese character for "fire" and realized this was a chief heading to the scene.

I think the Chinese traffic makes something like this absolutely necessary, for two reasons. 1) It's often as crowded as Manhattan. 2) Chinese drivers simply do not respond to emergency lights of any sort. The oddest part about the second part is that so many aspects of Chinese culture require much more subversion to authority than American culture (school drills, random searches [yup, seen them], traffic wardens, security personnel everywhere, and lots of restrictions on personal freedom by the gov't for the olympics), and yet the authority vested in the emergency response teams seems to have no effect.

Anyway, the motorcycle was small enough to weave through traffic to some extent, and take bike roads. I suspect that's exactly what it's designed for.