Let us be clear... (irony intended). Yes, the air is bad. The city has a lot of cars and polluting factories and much like Los Angeles, Mexico City & Salt Lake City, it is surrounded by mountains and is in sort of in a “bowl”. These factors, along with high pressures in the weather, keep the smog pushed down that it can’t get out out of the bowl without rain or strong winds. Although Anna Marie & Michael told us all about the bad air, real appreciation is experiencing. It’s like there’s a forest fire close by and the smoke covers the city - all the time.
Now remember, there are 1.2 billion people in China and the big cities are well populated. There are 21.5 million people in Beijing.
We learned from our tour guide, Vivian, that she has put her name into a lottery in order to be able to buy a car in Beijing. Only 15,000 per year are allowed to be sold and the lottery is the determining factor for one to be allowed to purchase one. There is also a policy based on one’s tag number that people can’t drive their car every day of the week.
Although the air is getting worse and worse as years go by, to their credit, there are a lot of bicycles and scooters on the streets. They also regularly put water on the main streets and heavily used intersections to keep the dust down, helping to reduce pollution. (More on Joey playing “chicken” with cars, scooters & bicycles later 😜)
In our country, we sometimes see Asian people in some of the large cities wearing air filter masks. We see a lot more of that here and it is quite normal for us to wear ours.
.......Lesson learned about first impressions... after 3 days the wind was reasonably strong and much of the smog blew out. The city was much nicer this day.😄
There are so many vehicles that even when pedestrians have green walk lights, it seems normal that if a motor vehicle has even the slightest opening through walking pedestrians, they’ll take it. Joey isn’t quite understanding that so we’ll. He must think that odds are, he won’t get hit a second time. Smart guy but sometimes needs guidance.
The food... On our 3rd day, we broke through our first impressions of the local food. Our first meal in Beijing was quite bad. After that making us a bit skitzy about having a second experience like that, we opted to use the hotel buffet for our next couple meals. Now, the 3rd day meal was lunch. Our tour guide Bella, who guided us to the Great Wall and Summer Palace, took us to a wonderful lunch in a local small town during our tour travels. It was excellent!
We have also eaten some good meals in our hotel - lots of vegetables which are very good but the meat products all seem pretty bland and sometimes chalky. Not a real problem for us as we’re not huge meat eaters.
We haven’t found any cheese in any stores but while pursuing in a store, we found Yellow Tail wine ($5.00 - $7.00 in the states) for about $40 per bottle here. We get unlimited wine with our hotel dinner buffet so we don’t need to go wild with the spending for Yellow Tail. 😜
The Sunworld Dynasty Hotel is excellent. We’re in a great central location and the room is quite clean and spacious enough for us. We have breakfast included with our room (a huge buffet) which is quite nice to be able to start our day without too much effort before heading out for our day.
We’re not all that familiar with the cost of goods here. The currency exchange is usually done quickly and therefore somewhat loosely. Our guide Vivian, has had the opportunity to travel to the states periodically and told us that she can buy products that are made in China, while she’s traveling to New York, and pay less in NY than she does for the same product in Beijing. 😳
It’s our 3rd full day here and are still dealing with the jet lag. No matter what time we go to sleep, we’re wide awake by 3:00am. (1:00pm in Salt Lake City) Ugh.....
At the risk of rambling, we were talking at dinner this evening and one of the things we’ve noticed with both of our tour guides is a subtle resentment to the “system” they live in when answering our questions about it. We were told about the rich farmers with a sense of distain for their richness. . We were also told conflicting points of view about the air pollution; one being “not bad” at all and the other asking if we have masks. Very conflicting in the degree of severity. We do realize that with only two sources, we can’t really get a sense local of life in China - Everything is subjective from the point of view of the individual. From our point of view, we’re quite happy to have come to experience China, especially now that we’ve seen the Great Wall (one of the Seven Wonders of the World).
Walked just down to the corner in the time we have waiting for our ride to the airport and walked through the Apple Store to the 6 storey mall. Quite fun. Check out the piano playing in the center area.
Is this the international sign for “don’t slip”? A banana?
We couldn’t help ourselves and stopped at a Starbucks. (Don’t give us that “Awwww”, it could have been a McDonalds😫). Got a Flat White and a chocolate brownie - pretty good. 
We’re off to Bangkok. More after we arrive there. 😄
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