In this week's Observer, I take a look at the city (and its neighbor, Tianjin) as the new subway lines open, the new traffic restrictions take hold, and more of the wrappings come off the Olympic-era version of Beijing.
Half the private cars went off the roads starting on Sunday, as planned. So why did my cab plunge straight into a bad traffic jam as soon as it tried to get onto the Second Ring Road this morning?
Because what also happened on Sunday was that the left lane of the Second Ring became an Olympics-only lane, closed to regular vehicles. The algebra is a little mystifying without plugging in the full numerical proportions of taxis and buses and government vehicles in the traffic stream, but empirically speaking, half as many cars driving in two-thirds as many lanes is much worse than the usual traffic.
As we hit another jam on the Fourth Ring, which has also lost a lane to official Olympic vehicles, I told the driver (in a fleeting moment of Mandarin competence), "The Olympic things are only convenient to the Olympics. For everyone else, they're annoying." The driver clapped a hand over his mouth, and held it there theatrically. Then he put it back on the steering wheel. "Understand?" he said.
Understood! The Olympics is good for everyone. If you're here in Beijing enjoying it, the trick is to remember that the Third Ring has no Olympics lanes. Take the Third Ring whenever possible, rather than the Second or Fourth.
So much for my hunch that the pre-Olympic demolition crews had forgotten about the old kitchen-supply store and the Peugeot service station out on the block behind us. With less than a month to go before the construction deadline, while we were away on a visa run, the whole stretch got chai'd. Now there's a wide-open view, stark yet oddly pastoral, all the way to the inexplicably celebrated skybridges of the newest Moma complex.
On February 29, I took a press tour of the new No. 10 subway line, which generally follows the path of the Third Ring Road--or will, anyway, once it is built out. For the Olympics, the No. 10 is supposed to only cover part of the loop. The tracks were working by the time the press tour convened; we boarded a train on the west side of the city and rode it clockwise around the north side of the Third Ring Road and down the east side, disembarking in the Central Business District at the foot of the CCTV building. Some of the stations we passed through looked nearly finished, but others had a lot of interior work to go.
In the briefing at the beginning of the tour, we were told that the Olympic part of Line 10 would be open by the end of June. Today was July 1. Along the Third Ring, the station entrances were still gated shut.
The neighborhood newsstand has now been re-relocated, from the pit on the northwest corner of the alley mouth to the sidewalk on southeast corner, in front of the defunct bank. It has also acquired a new canopy advertising China Mobile.
While I was buying a calling card (China Telecom, not China Mobile) and a dust-covered copy of Bazaar, a group of about a dozen people, many of them men in short-sleeved uniform shirts, crowded up behind me and began demanding to see the newsstand's business license. The newsstand man pulled out a pair of framed certificates, and a discussion ensued, seemingly about the newsstand's correct business address.
The delegation moved up the street, pausing to lecture another shopkeeper about something or other, then marched through the gate of the big construction site. No two of the uniforms were the same: they looked like a shirtsleeved Chinese version of the Joint Chiefs of Staff--one man in army light green, one in light blue, one in dark blue, and one for some reason in nautical whites, complete with a nautical cap. After quite a while in the construction site, the group marched back out, got in a black SUV and a utilitarian Mercedes minibus, and drove away. Before they pulled out, through the tinted minibus window I saw that one of them had a shoulder patch reading "Health Inspection."
To the casual observer, this might appear to be a newsstand desperately clinging to its longtime piece of ground as construction digging closes in all around it. Not so! The newsstand's longtime piece of ground was obliterated, filled in, and paved a couple of weeks ago. The newsstand is now desperately clinging to the new piece of ground that it retreated to.
The watermelons are here. It's hard to find a watermelon that's anything but delicious in summer in Beijing; we've gotten a bad one only once, though we could probably repeat the feat if we bought from the guy who sells fruit from the broken-down minibus right outside our apartment, because his fruit is always bad (and criminally priced).
Instead, I bought this one from the Lohao City organic-food market. It was so ripe and tender that when the knife cut into it, it obligingly split itself in half.
