In Beijing: Air Pollution

In Beijing: Air Pollution

Beijing has a real air pollution problem. After our plane broke through the clouds on arrival we saw that the city's sky was the color of dirty dish water. We then had three days of blue sky before the return of cloudiness and gray/brown air. An article in China Today said that the problem was the wafting of smoke from the countryside caused by the seasonal burning of straw by farmers. One of the tourist guidebooks mentioned that another source of the pollution was the dust caused by the razing of old buildings as Beijing modernizes and spruces up for the 2008 Olympics. There may also be some air inversion thing going on like in Los Angeles. There are mountains around Beijing and the air has the look of being stagnant and trapped.

We have just spent the day walking through some of the neighborhoods that are being torn down. They are the poorest part of the city, called hutongs--alleyways--that wind like mazes all around the center of Beijing, The Forbidden City.

The hutongs are also the oldest parts of Beijing and have become a favorite of tourists like us because of their humble simplicity, working-class authenticity, history, and the romance that goes with anything that is about to be no more. The language barrier is a near-absolute barrier to conversation on any subject in China so I don't know how the residents of the hutongs themselves feel about their destruction but this Yankee tourist found them charming in their humble simplicity, working-class authenticity, history and romance of being endangered. So enchanted that we have skipped seeing the Great Wall to spend more time in and photographingthe hutongs. We have felt like National Geographic anthropologists documenting for posterity a little-known and soon-to-be-gone culture. We like to feel like National Geographic anthropologists because it makes us feel important, not like tourists with cameras and sneakers, just like we like having a blog because it makes us feel more important than does spending the same amount of time on pornography sites or ESPN.

We have spent three full days walking the hutongs and there may be something to their razing being a source of air pollution. Both my girlfriend and I have had some minor but weird skin things. She has had a nasty coldsore-looking like thing on her Achilles heel. She said it didn't feel like a coldsore but it sure looked like it. The area around it started getting red and so we called a doctor who pronounced the area infected and gave her a topical anti-biotic.

Then I developed the same kind of thing on the bridge of my nose. It also doesn't hurt but I've put my girlfriend's anti-biotic cream on it the last couple of days.

We just came from the hutongs and my eyes feel irritated and my nose stuffed. (note: the following is more than you want to know.) I blew my nose and wiped it and the tissue paper was black. I've had the stuffy nose feeling since arrival and chest congestion also. But those are the things, don't you see, that all National Geographic type photographers-for-posterity have to put up with because we are so important. This is Public Occurrences.