cyn and i joked all the time about how we were going to be as far away from bj as humanly possible when the olympics came. we made jokes about how the government was going to paint the grass green and 'relocate' millions of factory workers by shutting down all the industry in the vicinity to clear the air for the lao wai. can't look bad in front of foreigners. of course, we joked with an air of cynicism, halfway serious.
after a long weekend in bj, where i experienced the dust and grit from the construction sites on every block or so, i am officially concerned. trev and i frequently discuss that shanghai is much better organized as a city - the airport, the way you pay your bills, the traffic, whatever. the metro in beijing alone is cause for alarm. you pay only by walking up to the booth and fighting your way to the front of the crowd, and then correctly shouting the name of the stop you want to go to. they don't speak shit for english, so good luck with that strong northern errrrrrrrrrrrr accent. you have to know where you want to go in terms of metro stop, and you have to say it legibly to the metro worker, who is not a linguist and doesn't give a fuck about you. to enter the metro paid area, you hand your little ticket to the girl standing there. there is usually only one girl. no turnstiles. one person at a time. and they plan to support 2+ million foreigners? i don't know about this.
taxis will be another problem. the city government has started early and hands out pamphlets as you head towards your taxi at the airport taxi line. i haven't read the pamphlet, but i assume it will be relatively useless against taxi drivers who are renowned in the country for being crooked, and who don't speak english, aren't linguists, and don't give a fuck about you. there's also a huge shortage of taxis during rush hour, and bj is a city much like LA: spread out and impossible to navigate without a car. see above if you plan to travel by metro.
lastly, the government is 'cracking down' (and thats no joke in a country like this) on foreigners without visas, and trev warned me that maybe i should start carrying my passport with me while in bj. the police will be randomly stopping foreigners and demanding to see their entry visas. i made some comment about sewing the star of david to my clothes, which of course was a whiner-lame comment for obvious reasons, but i feel a little scared about the liberties with which police can take. if i was white, i would be less worried, but looking asian and not being local presents a lot of issue here. on one hand, if i were alone i probably just wouldn't get stopped for obvious reasons. but with trevor, i might. 100% of chinese believe that i'm being some snotty local who refuses to speak chinese because i have a lao wai boy at my side. they are more baffled when trevor speaks chinese to them and then translates to me in english. you would need to see how white foreigners get treated here vs. local chinese to fully grasp what i'm talking about. once, after checking in at the airport counter in guangzhou, cyn and i headed towards security. a man stopped us and put our bags on a scale, and told us we were carrying overly heavy bags and to go back and check them in. meanwhile (as we're arguing), about 37 lao wai businessmen with huge carry on suitcases go rolling by us, very clearly over the 10 kilo limit. we then go back and check our shit in, and witness the same man who told us there were no earlier flights to ho chi minh (our layover was 6 hours), allow a white couple on a flight to ho chi minh that was leaving in an hour.
this shit is typical.
i'm not just china-bashing (which i do a fair share of, i know). i know greece isn't exactly a model for municipal organization, and athens went off fine. i know bringing their cities up to par is forcing china to engage in a value system that, while considered a figment of the current western paradigm, is largely believed to be the right direction (hello, environmental controls). it is bringing a huge injection of significant architecture to the capital city. (speaking of which, i just flew out of the new wing of the bj airport. very cool. it's totally a copy of hong kong's airport, much like SFO's new international building is a copy of narita, but it's very nice. hk has such an amazing airport, copying it wasn't a bad idea. i insisted on going to the burger king, so trev and i shared a whopper tao can and walked around admiring everything.) it's a boon for the image of the nation and playing a part in driving the skyrocketing economy. but being here, living here, knowing how already difficult and poorly planned so many aspects of the actual day-to-day logistics are, and knowing that china holds that additional complication of a censored media and corrupt government and a lack of infrastructure... i'm just saying that maybe you want to bring your respro, load a crash mandarin course on your ipod, and be very patient.
No comments:
Post a Comment