雨

I really like the character for rain. It almost looks like rain falling on your window... anyway, it's raining. It started to pour around 4:30 or 5 and it's still going! I had just immerged from the hutongs, had NO idea where I was and just barely got in a taxi when the sky ripped open. I mean serious rain... like, couldn't see 5 feet in front of the taxi, are we in a car wash? kind of rain.

Now, I recently saw the new Woody Allen movie "Midnight in Paris" (which is GREAT by the way and you should go see it) and the main character talks about how much he loves Paris in the rain, and later on goes on to say any city in the rain. Not so with Beijing. I can appreciate why it might be nice to stroll in the rain in a romantic European city but here it's just gross. Don't get me wrong, I <3 Beijing. a lot. But it's pretty gross. Probably mostly because of the pollution but also because there are just so many cars, bicycles, scooters, people spitting, etc so it's just kind of grimey here. Not just normal, college bar street on a sunday morning kind of grime but just dark, grittiness that you don't want to touch. While in some cities the rain kind of refreshes things and gives them a new shine, here it just presents you with huge puddles and mid-street rivers of pure disgusting and since you were probably wearing fairly open shoes to combat the very hot weather before the storm, congratulations! you now have a foot disease. I'm being a bit dramatic here, but I want to be clear: rain makes things worse here. The only up side is the potential that so much storming will clear up the smog and tomorrow we could have blue skies! so yay for that. Despite my tangential rain tirade, today was a great day! As mentioned in the previous post, I went and got lost in the hutongs near the Drum and Bell Towers in the Dongcheng district of town. I think up until now I've been generally a bit disheartened by the amount of change and "progress" that has happened since I was last here. Since the Olympics, Beijing has kind of been thrown open as a playground for foreign architects to build their crazy, gravity-defying kinds of buildings that sure, are pretty cool, but add nothing to (if anything detract from) the character of the city. A long time ago, nothing was allowed to be taller than the Forbidden City. That meant that very rarely was anything more than 2 or 3 stories high and I loved it. While a very widespread city, it helped it feel more homey and manageable to me, if that makes sense. It's for similar reasons that I dislike Shanghai. The dizzying skyscrapers and huge flashing lights and screens everywhere make me feel like I'm on ecstacy in Las Vegas and I never quite knew where I was because you couldn't see anything past the block you were on (plus I guess because I'm on ecstacy). It's kind of like the difference between Washinton D.C. and New York City in my mind... but imagine NYC on steroids. Anyway, gone are the days of short, homey Beijing and now there are huge skyscrapers and flashing lights and screens everywhere and it makes me sad! Everything old and nice here is being torn down for new and shiny and plastic and I don't know what the Chinese government is thinking! Even my favorite section of the Great Wall--SiMaTai is getting renovated. This place was like the most authentic part of the wall! It was crumbling and you had to really hike and scramble to get to each guard tower and there were some you couldn't get to because of the natural disrepair of the wall. Anyway, apparently now it's closed while they fix it up. Rita tells me they've also torn down old city walls and replaced them with new, plastic replicas. I mean, what the hell? Was this whole place secretly bought out by Disney?

Anyway, back to why today was awesome. Getting lost in the hutongs felt a lot more like the Beijing I knew way back when. Short little walls and houses in the shadows of temples and towers is exactly the mix of old and new that made me fall in love with this place. Anyway, it was nice to see. Potentially if I spent more time away from the ex-pat part of the city where Rita lives I'd see this side of it more often :)