After obtaining my visa for China, I finally got to enjoy the first week of travel for work, holding meetings to discuss new technical issues that impact the business. I get to finally meet the teams in Beijing and Tokyo who I have previously only spoken to.
However as I’m working all the time, the peak-hour taxi to the office driving through Beijing’s traffic is pretty much my overriding memory of Beijing from this trip and the extent of my cultural engagement, for the moment that is.
Everywhere there are cars. Thousands of cars. There are thousands of people. Everywhere you look there are people. It’s truly busy, but not in the same way that Bangkok is overtly in your face, but it’s a constant, humming busy.
Perpetual human motion.
Cars are weaved within inches of each other, straddling lanes. People do a sort of stop-start action at pedestrian crossings, trying to cross the road. These are pedestrian crossings that are really more akin to spilled paint on the road than formal markings. Bicycles are peddled in line or in formation of fours or fives, taking the place of a car on the road. Electric powered bicycles are cruised, serenely easing past their muscle powered ancestors. Everywhere you look is jostling, bustling, bumping, pushing to get ahead. It’s gutsy, no fear, forceful. It’s pretty loose when it comes to road-sense, just frightening enough to get you on edge so you don’t need a coffee but not enough to scare the living daylights out of you.
One morning, after having sat in a traffic jam for 10 minutes trying to get onto one of Beijing’s ring-roads, our man took a back route out of frustration, leading us through a local area where the world was getting ready to trade: three wheeled bikes pedal bags of lettuces and noodles to the restaurants or carry lashed up bags of refuse for recycling. We see one bike loaded 12 feet in the air with recycling materials, the top load being plastic bottles, tied together with string so that they look like an opaque bubble-cloud.
Sitting at traffic at a later time, I heard a clicking noise, it wasn’t the tapping of blackberries coming from the back of the car, it was coming from the driver. I looked over to see him palming a pair of varnished mahogony walnuts in his left hand, like some sort of worry-token. It brought a smile to my face as I thought that it wasn’t just me that thought Beijing driving required a certain level of testicular fortitude, he was also driving with his nuts out.
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