Streets

Beijing has 3 million cars, and our apartment complex sits on Xueqing Lu, one of the city's main thoroughfares. The rush hours (7-10 & 4-8) get a little ridiculous around here, in that walking down the street at nine in the morning will get you to your destination faster than any motorized vehicle, e-bikes excluded. Nevertheless, people insist on driving cars, trucks, motorized rickshaws, and some indescribable home-built rigs that are usually overloaded with something toxic. But since we haven't bought bicycles yet, we find it's much better to just walk a bit in the morning, if for no other reason than the chance to see an old man taking his bird out for some fresh air. I know why the caged bird sings--he wants some new cage liners, better chow, and something other than a bus stop to blink at.


To beat the traffic, we went looking for an e-bike yesterday, but not before the third repairman of the week arrived to fix the air-conditioner in our bedroom. Out of the three workers to visit the apartment so far, this guy was the best. But in China, as in most other places outside the US, the air conditioning units are on the exterior of the building, and connect to the interior fan through a hose that runs through the wall. So imagine what ran through our heads when our repairman tied one end of an old rope around his waist and the other around our steam pipe before climbing out of our window, which is five stories above ground level. ("How do you say 'splat!' In Chinese?") He got the air conditioning working, however, and we learned a few new words in the process: shue (water) and gan-bi (pen). And where we couldn't communicate, we somehow worked it out by mime. Thanks to his efforts, we are now sleeping on the hardest mattress ever built in a room that's a cool 68 degrees at night.

Post-repairs and a trip to Wau-er-ma (Wal-Mart) for groceries, we took a walk to look for bicycle shops. Our directions from Jennifer were to walk west on the Dirt Street until we hit Recycling Road, and then to keep walking southwest until we found the stores. Dirt Street, so named by Jen and Luke because it was unpaved until last year, features a bunch of food stands and folks selling various items of clothing/trinkets off of blankets. But selling food or anything else on the street is illegal in Beijing, so the vendors place their wares on the backs of motorized rickshaws so that they can get away from the cops. Imagine our surprise, then, when we walked by a vendor selling a small bag that we threw away two days ago. We really need to buy a paper shredder.


The silver lining is that Beijing has an better recycling system than most US cities. This is due, in part, to the fact that people in China can scrape by on jobs that pay less than a dollar an hour in some instances, some by sorting through trash and selling the recyclables. Recycling Street, located 400 meters west of our apartment, is where this happens.

But Recycling Road is not just for people to hock styrofoam, bikes, and furniture. There's stores, too, including a tattoo shop where we saw Overripe Man again. He was sitting outside, shirt off, smoking a cigarette while one of his buddies was getting some serious ink with needles that no doubt had been recycled.

Amongst all of the hubbub on dirt street were small children. In the U.S., people will sometimes use cloth diapers when they can't afford the disposables. Here, however, the poorest people buy special pants for their kids that are sort of like a union suit, but without the flap. This way, kids can just squat down on the street, have at it, and their parents can clean it up. As a practical matter, however, parents just let it sit there, wipe their kids up a bit, and walk away. Thankfully we only saw this happen once yesterday--most of the kids we walked past either had on big boy pants or disposables.



We eventually found the stores we wanted but we decided to hold off on the project until we could go back with someone that could bargain in Mandarin. So we made our way a little bit further south through the rush hour on Recycling Road to a wonderful little vegetarian restaurant that Katie found in "That's Beijing." It's the place where the hip Buddhist monks eat, and it's got some amazing dishes and teas. Try the juju fruit/ginger tea--it's awesome.