China, Asia, Climbing and Fixed Gear Bikes

In the past few years that has been an enormous development in Beijing. In so many areas the nice traditional 1 story buildings like the beautiful courtyards have been torn down to give way for more glass high rises. The Financial Street (Jinrong Jie) in Beijing has become longer and longer with more and more office buildings. Most of them still empty. Like these ones next to my office.

Next to is are still towers of typical Chinese residential buildings. They are about 26 stories high and always look the same. Before the Olympics the city put huge efforts to repaint them all. So some look better from the outside – but only at a first glance. This building is what I see from my office.

It is amazing to see that the residents constantly throw things out of the window. And also empty bottles out of the window. So the best is to have a small roof above your window as well as keeping the windows closed at all times (except for when you have trash to throw out) to protect your apartment from falling garbage.

There is somebody who owns pigeons and has a pigeon house on the top of the building. He lets the pigeons out for some flying in the late afternoon every day. But actually I often wonder why there are no wild urban pigeons in Beijing. They are in almost all big cities, especially Western cities.

In case you did not pay attention to the pictures: We have been having gorgeous blue skies here in Beijing. 🙂

The Beijing Improv Group arranged another night with great theater sport show. This time they performed in a bigger theater next to the Beijing Academy of Drama. The show was called „The Return of the Jing“.

I think that name might have been inspired by the fact that the Beijing residents finally have the feeling that the Capital (Jing) is returning back to normal as the Olympic period is over. So the Jing is returning back to us.

Finally I hat time to chang the style of the webalbums I generate. The first uploaded webalbum has pictures of this Improv show. Please have a look at the pictures. Actually it should automatically start advancing to the next picture till it reaches the last picture. If not, then go to the first picture and click the small button „Play“ on top right of the picture. The automatic slide show should start (Java required). I hope you like the new style of the webalbum. If you encounter problems or have suggestions, please let me know.

I did not expect it to be this bad. Beijing had a special rule since July that on an even date on cars that had a number plate ending with an even number were allowed to drive and on odd dates only the odd numbers. Also trucks and big vehicles were also not allowed to drive within the 5th ring road. But those restrictions were only valid till September 20th 2008. Now we are back to normal.

Are we really? Has it always been this bad? Between 5pm and 7:30pm cars seem to not move on one of the huge East-West roads I have been cycling on yesterday and today. The road looks like a 6 lane wide 10km long parking lot crammed with cars. Good that there is a special bus lane for the rush hour which the bicyclists can also use. We were all speeding by the jammed cars. That is fun. Well, for me as I am a bicyclist. For the car drivers it seemed to be annoying as I have seen the craziest driving techniques I had long forgotten about (In my memory the driving style was getting more civilized in the past 12 months. But it seems the drivers have forgotten about that.). I have seen cars pull out into the opposite side of the street driving against that traffic on the fast lane and then cutting across 3 lanes of cars going in the same direction to make a right turn. And almost hitting the bicyclists.

Maybe there are just more cars in Beijing than 3 months ago. According to the statistics that should be 90000 more cars which could contribute to the difference. Or maybe people had been encouraged to use their cars during the period of the restrictions as there were not so many traffic jams.

Not just the non car owning population is unhappy. There even voices that suggest Beijing to continue with the driving restrictions. I think that would be a great idea! Even a Chinese friend of mine pointed out that the restrictions helped him start bicycling again. That resulted in weight loss. And he now even thinks it does not make sense to own a car in Beijing. I hope others start thinking the same!

Today I friend of mine initiated to meet for some kayaking on Houhai Lake of Beijing. While waiting at the bridge I saw a wedding boat procession:

Then came the boat with the bride and groom as well as the good man throwing cigarettes to the crowd (Chinese tradition) while the bride’s face was covered by a red (the color of happiness and good luck) cloth:

I also saw children in the typical Chinese environmentally friendly pants (no diapers are used):

When we came to the kayak rental I ran into my former dragon boat team. They just finished a dragon boat race today and unfortunately lost. But the great news is they now practice Sunday afternoons and not anymore early Sunday mornings (which was one of the reasons I did not show up anymore).

We rented kayaks and paddled around the lake. We foreigners in these small boats were an attraction to the Chinese in their pedal propelled boats. They were all friendly, waved and said hi before taking the picture. We also past some courageous Chinese men swimming in Houhai. We washed our arms off after the kayaking.

There had been quite a lot of goodbye parties before the Olympics. But even now afterwards some of my friends are leaving China. It is usually a sad kind of party, especially for some of the people that I have known for a long time. But I hope to find the time to visit in their new homes.

A while ago there was suddenly smoke from a burning building not too far from where I was.

It was huge clouds, but I could not see which building it really came from as teh building was hidden behind the big white building. My colleagues called the emergency hotline. But it is different here than in other places: You hear no sirens nor any fire fighter brigade. The good thing was that it was a fire on a construction site and it did not last long. I hope that nobody got injured. The countryside people who come to the big cities to make some money for their families and get treated like nothing on the construction sites.

The other day I saw another fire. It was the front of a building on a construction site. I have seen that building and I was under the impression that they covered the front with a beautiful stone facade. But I do not think stone can burn so it p[robably was made out of some other material. At least here there were fire trucks standing around (they built a new fire station not too far away) trying to get the water hose to work. But everybody was very relaxed, because it was only the building burning and the construction workers were all safe.

The road construction work seems so random here in Beijing. You cycle on the same road as every day and suddenly they removed the top layers of the asphalt. Or on my way home from work suddenly there are 2 foot wide sections across the cycling path missing, or lets say they are like 2 foot long pit holes that are about 3 inch deep. I was so lucky that somehow I did see them just before I hit and that I do have a hand break on my commuter track bike. Two days later those huge pit holes are gone again as if they had never been there.

Or you ride the road you always take and suddenly there is this smooth dark new asphalt. Really amazing.

But I do not like coming home and finding a piece of paper in the entrance of the appartment building saying that starting from the next day there will be 26 days of no hot water like it happened already twice this year. I just wonder why that repair takes so much longer than redoing a huge section of a major street. Oh well at least currently we do have hot water.

How black an air pollution filter of my anti-pollution mask gets in only four weeks… Guess which one is the used filter:

If you want to get your own mask or new filters: click here!