Beijing is a modern city with electricity, sewerage, cars, running water, gas appliances, television, DVDs, pirate DVDs, entertainment, etc. Just like any other first world city on the planet today. However, there are some differences..
In most places in either the USA, Australia or Europe, horses no longer exist as a work animal beyond the farm. In Beijing, things are slightly different. Early one morning I heard what sounded like hoofs on the road, moving quite quickly. Below my window, I saw the below image: 2 horses hooning up the street, in the middle of the road, parked cars and other traffic (cars) on the road as well.
For some farmers, the horse's duty doesn't end at the farm gates - some are required to pull a load all the way into town. At the local outdoor markets (I'm not sure if they're the equivalent of the "farmer's market" or not), I've not yet seen a horse & cart, but I'm full well expecting to any time soon!
Earlier in the year, I snapped a picture of a horse sitting on the ground with a cart of that had slid forward onto the animal's rear end (it wasn't clear if it had hurt it, aside from bruising.) I was wondering how on earth that kind of situation could arise. Then I saw this scene. Three horses, with carts behind them, parked on the site where makeshift housing and just been torn down some weeks earlier. On coming by later in the day, one had its cart almost fully loaded - its driver was still loading up more bricks.
There is a lot of construction going on around Beijing, at present. In almost every part of the city you can see cranes at some construction site. Their construction codes seem to vary a lot (if they have any.) I've seen people demonstrating about the quality of the apartment buildings that have bought into (off the plan style.) The result, after the building has been completed, is disturbing. There are holes in the floor, holes in the wall, holes...the quality was unbelivably bad. The hatchet job with this photo is to remove picture noise and just leave this board with photos of poor construction quality.
In the apartment complex I live in, it is reasonably ok, except that they don't know how to put plaster onto concrete properly and have it stay there. One building that is part of the complex, but set apart from it, on the other side of a main road, has been constructed for all of the people who used to live on this site in hutongs. This building stands alone on the south west corner of Chungfu Lu. This building has 2.5m ceilings and, according to one of my co-workers who went there looking for an apartment, is much much less attractive to live in than those where the rotation engineers live.
The conditions in which construction workers undertake work varies. Some of them wear hard hats, which is a good start, but then they will be doing spot welding, at the top of a building, in the middle of the night, with only the light of the welding torch to guide what they're doing. Or they may build ramps up to where they're working that look like they'll collapse quite easily.
For those construction workers that don't live on site, how are they expected to get to work? By bus, of course. But not the kind of bus that you or I would take that runs down main street and where you pay for a ticket but the private kind of bus. Sometimes this is a truck and all of the passengers sit in the tray at the back and sometimes this is a minivan. The minivan seems to be the more prefered approach - it can double as a place to rest during the day. In the one pictured below, there wasn't a free space inside, even the step leading in was in use by someone as a resting place.
Such is the prevalence of construction around this city that no matter where you look, you see cranes building something. A wonder if they outnumber those that could be seen in the skyline of Berlin at the height of its reconstruction in the 1990s? But the cranes do seem to just go on and on, as far as you can see, into the mist.
Down where they're building the Olypmic Park, construction is still in progress. I wonder what the quality of the housing provided for the athletes and all of the Olympic guests will be like and who will live there after they leave? At present there's still lots of dirt where the Olympic Park is to be, but they've got 3 years to turn it into something reasonable.
Sometimes when you're working away on your construction site, you have a bad day, make a wrong turn and run into a wall and lose your load. Well, that's probably being kind to this gent, as it does look like he's just decided to dump his garbage at this wall - not at all unchinese like.
The rate of construction is hard to imagine here. In this photo below, there's an entire community of apartment buildings being built. To get an idea of the number being built, count the number of lift well tops you can see across the buildings in the foreground. Then multiply that by the depth of the construction site and you start to get an idea of how many buildings are going up here.
Strangely there aren't a lot of very tall buildings in Beijing, whether this is because of the land not being able to support that style of engineering or some other reason (cost?), I can't say. But buildings predominately top out at between 15 and 25 floors.
Apologies for the curves, I didn't think of doing the stiching thing until I got home and then I only had two pictures to work with.
Outdoor markets bring together a wide variety of people and goods, not to mention the ways in which people sell their goods.
Most often, fruit and vegetables are laid out on the ground on top of sheets of one sort or another. In some cases, within the built up areas, these "stalls" can be quite temporary. On one occasion I saw the owner pull up their material with vegetables laid out and quickly disappear. I was a bit perplexed at this until I saw what looked like some sort of rent-a-cop turn up. The legitimate ones are much less transient and attract a good number of people, despite being open-air.
The more curious of these is the plastic contains with water and fish that are still alive. I watched one fish get scaled/gutted - I'm not sure that the person doing this had completely killed the fish when he started to go to work on it, given that it was still flapping its tail as its scales were ripped off.
However not all seafood sold in street markets is kept fresh, as can be seen here. What's missing from this picture? I would have said large amounts of ice, wouldn't you agree?
A couple more photos here, from the same market. The first was the most different means of selling wares that I saw here - back of the truck, sit down up there with your scales and all the fruit around you. The second I took because it seems to be "in vogue" to take pictures of the trays of nuts sold by vendors along the street. In this case the nuts and things were being sold in bags but just so people don't feel like I've missed anything, there's a complimentary nut stall photo too.
At one street side stall, more of a tourist one than a food one, I looked down and found the collection of souveniers to be a little bit different to normal. On the right, you have your Chinese balls for swirling in the palm of your hand, followed by the fake jade trinkets and then..martial arts weapons.
So everyone knows about the red army, but what about the yellow army? Like this one of workers I saw approaching me as we were going in opposite directions over the bridge?
But red is a very prodominate colour in things official. In this case, the colour red is for the flag this guy waves. Why does he wave it? To signal to bicycle riders that it is now time for them to stop so that traffic doing a left hand turn (our equivalent of right) get a chance. Yes, the lights are also red for traffic going straight ahead in that direction, but somehow when you're riding a bicycle, all traffic lights are green, or so it seems judging by the way people will ride through red lights if they won't risk their life in doing so. Oh, it is right hand turn on red here too. Well, sometimes I think it is do whatever you like, regardless of the colour of traffic lights but lets pretend they've been thoughtful and allowed it.
The red flag army was in its infancy when I arrived back there for the last time in September. As I furthered my adventures further out from the main intersection between where I was living and where I worked, I found more red flag wavers and at some intersections, trainees (people dressed in civvies holding a red flag and with a red band around the arm holding a flag.) I'm not sure how big this army will grow to be nor how long it will last for, but I do know how much impact it has - so long as the red flag holders are there, people on bikes respect them, if they're not there then it is business as usual for bike riders. At this intersection below there was so much traffic that it required not one but two trainees to properly address the problem. The trainers were off sitting on their laurels in the bushes, about 10-20 meters in from the corner. Unfortunately it was too dark to get a good photo of them at their best but when they saw the camera pointed in their direction, they were quick to get up off their laurels.
A lot of noise is made about the air quality in Beijing being bad due to the dirty industries that are around it. While I'm sure they do nothing to improve the general healthiness of the air, it is a very simplistic to say that they are all that is to blame for the air problem here. In large, most of the problem is due to the city's location, and no amount of green factories will ever help that. The city has mountains very close to it on both the north and west boundaries and in general, unless the wind is blowing from the north, the air is not clear at all. In my experience, this lasts for at most 48 hours. So what is responsible for the air problem here? My bet is dirt - the rain is nearly always dirty, leaving behind a brown residue. The city is very dry, the area around it is very dry. Over the mountains is a desert. Cars and trucks moving around the city stir up a lot of dust on the smaller roads, the wind picks up some and so it goes.
I'm not sure how close you are meant to build power stations, but this one "hides" behind a hill from the main city of Beijing. You can see the proximity of where people live to the cooling towers and the smoke stacks behind them.
Down in the valley, almost at the other end of the road that can be seen here going straight ahead, is a source of a lot of brown smoke. I'm not sure if this was a fire or the local industry working away. Either way, is nothing to get upset about - there's dirty industry all over the world and governments everywhere (especially the USA) are dragging their feet in forcing the problem to get cleaned up.
That is not to say that other sources of pollution don't exist. Some of the buses here are VERY dirty and tend to be the ones you are behind all too often when riding on a bike. While the government here may not need to answer to anyone about this, they need to be more proactive in ensuring the infrastructure they provide is clean. Then there are the three wheel vehicles that have an easily audible put-put sound as they move around. In the home, people burn a composite of clay and coal brick things. I've been told that these are not meant to be used inside the 4th ring road. If so, this "rule" is ignored by many - or there are a lot of exceptions to it granted - I've seen deliveries of them to dwellings on the other side of the moat to the Forbidden City.
In one of my wanderings around the hutongs, I saw these coal/clay bricks being used. Hot ones are transported from one place to another in the metal scoop of what you or I might sweep dust into. They're then placed in special metal containers to light other ones so you can boil water and make a cup of tea or put in a great bit vat underneath tonight's dinner. The pictures below illustrate how they're used in day to day life.
Further out, it isn't just these hybrid bricks that are supplied for burning, black coal is delivered by truck to dwellings as well (I want to call them homes but it doesn't quite seem right.) Look closely at the tray on the back of this truck to see what I'm talking about here.
