Day 17: Through the Smog

I woke up this morning and looked out of the window to see… nothing.  The next building over was somewhat hazy and beyond that was a white veil of smog.  I thought the smog yesterday was bad, but today the visibility was probably half of what it was yesterday.  According to Greg, this is what Beijing usually looks like, I was just lucky the last few days.  I looked online at the air quality index, which was 314.  This level of pollution puts the air quality in the “dangerous” category, with a notice that “the entire population is likely to be affected.”  That much pollution is 50% worse than it was yesterday, and twice as bad as any place in the US today.  Well, no dangerous air was going to stop me from seeing Beijing, so I headed out to the Olympic Green.

The site of the Olympic Games in 2008 has several neat buildings, most notably the “Bird’s Nest” and the “Cube.”  The Bird’s Nest looked neat in pictures and on TV, but up close it is incredible.  The design of the exterior is steel, but it is particularly interesting because there is no distinguishable outer wall.  The steel beams do not have anything between them, so the structure underneath is exposed to the elements, and it actually must be sealed.  The stadium holds 80,000 people, so it had to be designed for efficient entry and exit.  I think that the entry gates went all the way from A-L, so there were certainly plenty of ways out.  Furthermore, down the entire Olympic Green is a pedestrian road called Olympic Ave, which was probably 50 yards wide, so tons of people could go down it.

The smog there was incredible as well.  I did not have to get far from any buildings for them to become obscured.  Walking into the park, the Bird’s Nest was a bit fuzzy.  At the Nest, looking across the avenue I could see the “Cube” aquatic center, though it was hazy, and the buildings beyond the park were barely visible.  The full length of the Olympic venue is about a mile, so as I looked down the avenue, everything faded off into whiteness.  I walked around the venue for a while, and everything was very cool.  There was an Olympic tower, the torch, several other Olympic buildings, but everything was covered in smog.  I felt bad for the families I saw there, that have to raise their children in a city where the air is dangerous for most of the year.

The Bird's Nest, with the Cube and several other builds off in the smog.

Close up of the Bird's Nest.

The building was very cool.

The Cube

Fading off into nothing

On my way out, I walked through I mall built under the Olympic Green.  Based on the map, they had only built the first third of it, yet as I walked through the entire mall was deserted.  Janitors kept it sparkling clean, yet the only stores I could find in the entire mall were a McDonald’s and a movie theater.  I took a taxi over to the big shopping street Greg and I went to the other day to get some lunch.  I ate at a Japanese restaurant and had very good fried rice and noodles, though the waitress spoke very little English, so there was lots of pointing and guessing.  It took six people to figure out that I wanted to pay.  I bet if I had just left they could have figured it out.  Before moving on, I looked around in some stores, including a foreign language bookstore, which had a good selection of English books, though they were a bit expensive.

Next up, I planned to go to the new CCTV (China Central Television) building, which is very unique (It looks like this).  Around it are several other unique buildings, so I had planned to walk around and take some photos of them.  Before I left in the morning, I went to the concierge and told him where I wanted to go, and asked him to write it on a card so the driver would know where to go.  He simply wrote “CCTV” and said that any driver would know where that was.  When I finally found a taxi after about 20 minutes of searching for a free one, I handed the driver the card and said I wanted to go to CCTV.  He hoed and hummed for a few moments, and finally said “CCTV, ok.”  He didn’t seem so sure, but we were off.  Throughout the ride, he mumbled “CCTV…,” as if he was still trying to figure out where to go.  When we passed the Forbidden City, I knew we must be going the wrong way.  I showed him the map and where I wanted to go, but he was insistent that this way was correct.  I was going to ask him to stop at the next western hotel I saw, so that I could ask them for help, but I did not see any before I arrived.  I got out of the taxi, and sure enough, there was the CCTV Building, the old CCTV Building, on the opposite side of town from the new CCTV Building.  The crazy looking building had just been completed a couple of years ago, and is not completely in use yet.  By this time it was getting late, so I decided not to try to explain where I wanted to go to another driver, and just to come back to the hotel.

The old CCTV building…

On a positive note, at least I got to see this near the old CCTV Building.

This evening for dinner, Greg and I walked across the street by the hotel and went to a restaurant recommended by the staff.  There our waitress spoke no English, so we just pointed to everything we wanted in the menu, and held up one finger to confirm we only wanted one of each.  Bottled water was not in the menu, and the waitress could not understand us, so Greg had to pull out his phone and use Google Translate to tell her what we wanted.  We had fried shrimp, spicy potato slices (I don’t know how else to describe them), and sweet pork.  The meal wasn’t too bad, though the potatoes were a bit on the spicy side, and the pork a bit on the sweet and fatty side.  It was good enough that we were definitely full at the end.

Dinner

Tomorrow morning we fly to Bangkok via Hong Kong, so it is yet another flight day.  Hopefully we will make our flight in Hong Kong, as we only have an hour between the flights.  We packed extra clothes in our carry-on bags, and clothes in each other’s checked bags in case we lose a bag, because we will leave for Cambodia on Friday morning, and we won’t be back to pick up our bags until after the weekend.