On a clear day you can see the mountains

Before I launch into this post, I wanted to insert the necessary disclaimer that this post reflects MY views only. Not those of the US government or the State Department or anybody or anything official. Not even those of my husband.  They are mine alone.

On smoggy Beijing days when we are stuck inside due to poor air quality, one word keeps running through my mind. The word is "shame".  As in, what a shame, what a waste.  This is a great city.  Very vibrant.  It has a completely different culture for us to explore. Tons and tons of stuff to do. Pretty much every type of food you can imagine.  Lots of parks, lots of cultural stuff. Beautiful mountains just outside the city where you can hike and explore.  Acrobat shows, ancient palaces and temples, crazy and chaotic streets.  We have lots of cool culture, but you can also easily get pretty much any grocery item you want.  It REALLY can be a great place to live.  Except for the pollution.  If there is no wind a-blowing here, the pollution settles over the city. It then sits there until it rains, snows or becomes windy. I've coped with air pollution before. I mean, I'm from Dallas, right?  I definitely haven't been living my life in pristine pastoral air quality. I also lived for a year in Naples, Italy, which is a pretty polluted place as well.  That said, I've never ever seen air pollution like this. You can literally see, smell and taste it.  When I tell you it is polluted -- unless you have lived here or are currently living here -- you probably can't truly imagine how bad air pollution can be. A gorgeous, "good" air quality day here is about the same as the smoggiest day ever in Los Angeles.  And, after a couple of months here, you really do start to go with the flow most days. It is what it is.  You try to limit your childrens' outdoor activities on really bad days, perhaps you thrown a pollution mask on.  You avoid jogging outdoors and try not to exert yourself much at all since you do not want to vigorously breathe in all of the tiny nasty particles that cause cancer and lung infections.

I've been thinking about this blog post for quite some time. Right now, it is spring and very windy here.  That means lots of blue sky days. It is warming up quickly here and I can get outdoors more to explore. I've biked more here in the past month than in the past 25 years. My rambling explorations help to give me some more perspective on what is around us and how to get there.  I've found my world for the past several months is pretty compound-specific.  We do venture outside the bubble on weekends, but most weekdays I am limited to where I can walk, bike or tuk-tuk. It was also really cold and smoggy through most of February and the early parts of March. 

We were lucky enough to hang out with my cousin and her family and one of Chris' former colleagues while they visited Beijing in March.  Playing tourist definitely gave me a deeper appreciation of all of the cool stuff the city has to offer.  I would go to the Great Wall and climb about every weekend if I could.  The kids all loved the palpable energy we encountered in Beijing parks where folks gather to fly kites, practice tai-chi, exercise on the crazy-looking equipment, play drums and sing.  In fact, it definitely made Chris and I wonder (oh, for the thousandth time or so) if we should have lived downtown instead of in the 'burbs.  I won't dwell on that thought too much since that ship has sailed.  I've unpacked, hung stuff on the walls, enrolled kids in the school out here -- we are staying here in the bubble.  BUT, we plan to take the kids into  the city as much as possible.  Despite the difficulty of traveling there as a family of 5.

Anyways, my ramblings aside, my main point is that it is a real shame that environmental regulation is clearly not something that has ever been a government priority here in China.  The fast pace of growth here is really amazing to watch.  New buildings seem to rise up overnight all through the city while old ones disappear. Incomes and wages are growing by leaps and bounds even for the folks toward the bottom of society.  Lung cancer rates have also skyrocketed.  In Beijing alone, lung cancer rates have increased by 60 percent over the last decade while the smoking rate has stayed the same.  My fellow Americans back home who scoff at the EPA and other regulatory agencies might like to come here for a few weeks for a first-hand look at what occurs when business is allowed to do what they will without any serious regulation.  There are currently dead pigs in the water supply in Shanghai and record-high levels of bad air quality days all across China.  Nobody drinks the tap water here if they can afford not to and nobody feeds their children and infants Chinese formula or dairy.

I do think that we Americans can get quite complacent about these various "nuisance" regulatory agencies primarily because, for the most part, they do a pretty darn good job.  Our government tries to protect us as much as they can even while we live here in China. Our homes and work places have lots of air filters.  We drink bottled water.  The government  issues recommendations on what foods we should and should not eat.  A huge deal of the shame and waste of it all is felt by the Chinese people. People who won't just be here for 2 or 3 years.  People who have to live with the pollution and the food quality issues on a long-term basis. Who can't afford bottled water and air filters. Shame, yes.  Absolutely.  And I can tell you that they are really, really sick of it.

Here is a picture of Beijing on a clear day. Lovely, huh?  See the mountains.  That is a rare sight indeed.

What To Eat...Or Not...When in China

So, with the pigs in the river and the world news' headlines of avian flu everywhere, the subject of meal preparation is the hottest topic on the playground.  Feeding a western family in China isn't the easiest endeavor on the best of days.  Chinese dairy has been out since the melamine controversy of 2008-2009.  Most expats here buy shelf-stable milk from France or Australia and imported cheese and yogurt.  Beef and pork are apparently chock-full of chemicals and not a regular part of many people's menus even if they aren't semi-vegetarian like us. Fish and seafood are dodgy here since we aren't anywhere near the sea and I promise you don't want to eat anything from the rivers around Beijing. Chicken and eggs are currently out of favor due to avian flu concerns.  I don't think that anybody can actually catch it from these products-- especially if fully-cooked-- but the school cafeteria has stopped serving chicken and ayis everywhere advise against eating eggs.

Fruits and vegetables?  Why yes, they are lovely and plentiful.  Grown in toxic soil with all sorts of sketchy pesticides, but lovely all the same.  They kinda/sorta have the concept of organic here, but even if they didn't use pesticides on them (which is doubtful since there is nobody regulating the "organic" products) they are grown in the toxic soil and watered by the toxic rain.  We definitely eat the fruits and vegetables because I'm a thousand percent convinced that skipping them is ultimately more harmful than eating ones with pesticide residue.  We just wash them well and peel the things that we can.

I tend to fare a bit better than some moms because we were mostly vegetarian even before moving here.  I'm used to coming up with dinner ideas that involve beans, tofu, veggies and grains.  The absence of meat products doesn't really phase me.  My kids grumble a bit, but they are also accustomed to eating a predominantly vegetarian diet. I do struggle to come up with meal plans that utilize the readily available ingredients here and do not involve purchasing pricey cheese or imported goodies that may or may not be available.  Ricotta and cottage cheese cost well over $7 for a tiny container.  So, lasagna is more of a treat food than a staple.  Oddly enough, you can generally find tortillas and other Mexican food staples almost everywhere.  Well, except for Monday when I needed them to make enchiladas for Chris' birthday.  Then all of the stores within walking distance of the house didn't have any.  Rice paper was in the location where they usually store tortillas.  And that is not the same thing....at all. Rice paper enchiladas anyone? 

People cope with food safety here in a variety of ways.  Some people eat everything. including Chinese meat and dairy, while others don't eat anything Chinese.  I know that sounds almost impossible, but it is apparently somewhat manageable if you eat only processed foods and the available imported meats, fruits and vegetables. We take the middle ground, as I always try to do.  I don't feed my kids Chinese strawberries every day...or even every week, but we do eat them once a month or so.  The kids love the apples here so they eat those a lot, but I try to buy the ugly ones since they seem more likely to have fewer pesticides.  I buy imported milk and yogurt since those are staples, but we do eat Chinese cheese and sour cream occasionally. 

I know we are super lucky to have easy access to so many familiar food stuffs.  Many of Chris' colleagues headed off to consumables post where Western goods are virtually unobtainable.  So unobtainable that the state department gives you extra weight in your shipping allowance so you can bring canned goods and favorite non-perishable foods with you.  Dining out is quite affordable here and we have a huge variety of restaurants.  I've had great Thai and Italian here and we regularly munch on burritos at The Avocado Tree - a shameless knock-off of Chipotle.  Oh, and as a shameless plug for visitors, you can dine on scorpions, larva, seahorse and all sorts of other delicacies.  Totally organic, I'm sure!

Goodness Gracious, Great Wall of China

You'll have to ask Chris about the title, but I had to post some more pics on the blog. It really is super cool. I hope to get out to one stretch or another pretty often so we can see it in different seasons. The second time we actually rode this crazy toboggan down and it was just kooky kitschy fun. And totally safe I'm sure!

Inconvenient....

Our family size, that is.  I mean, I suppose we have to keep them all at this point, but we definitely have way too many kids for convenience in Asia.  When we decided to have our 3rd kiddo, it never occurred to us that fitting in a Chinese taxi or a tuk-tuk would be an issue.  Yet here we are...In a place I never expected to be, facing a complication that never occurred to me. Life is exciting, huh?

We live in the suburbs of Beijing, about 30-45 minutes from the central city.  Our kids' school is out here, as are lots of lovely people, a neighborhood where the kids can safely bike and walk and a nice array of shopping and restaurants.  We are also closer to the wall here than folks in the city.  That said, we do live in a serious expat bubble. Most of our fellow compound residents are European or American as well.  So, there isn't a ton of real, authentic Chinese culture here.  The grocery stores here cater to the ex-pats, as do the shops and restaurants.  Finding an actual Chinese restaurant near the house is amazingly difficult.  To experience "real" Chinese culture, you have to leave the bubble and go to "real" Beijing.

Since we have no car at the moment, that means we have to take a cab into the city. Beijing cabs are a tricky business and well-deserving of a separate blog post of their very own.  Our situation is even trickier because it is actually illegal for all 5 of us to go in one cab.  There are cameras everywhere that photograph the drivers on the highways -- and then issue traffic tickets.  So, cab drivers generally will not break the law and let us ride in one cab.  Even if one of us is a "baby" (yes, I know she is almost six). So, now you are up to a cost of at least $20-25 each way for our family of five to get into the city.  Plus, you get the added joy of the fact that the cab drivers appear to not communicate with each other even when they are all called at once by our housing compound staff and seem to have a chat beforehand.  So, they might, you know, do something fun like drop one set of us off at the South Gate of the Forbidden City and the other set at the West gate.  Just to test our navigation skills. Which doesn't sound that bad until you see the Forbidden City and how very, very vast and crowded the entire place is.  We were fine, really, but I digress...Hotels here do not want more than 2-3 people in a room.  Train cars don't hold more than 4 people either. I mean, a family of 4 here in China would be a very large family.  I'm somewhat used to five being an awkward number. In America, the world is definitely geared towards families of 4.  That is the size that fits in most hotel rooms, that most package deals are aimed at, etc. But China definitely takes a slight travel complication to a whole other level. Family deals here?  They mean 3 people.  Our (borrowed) tuk tuk?  Why yes, it holds 3 people!  Or 5 if you are really, um, creative.

Beijing does have an expansive, inexpensive metro system.  But it takes about 2 hours to go from downtown to our suburb.  We did it once.  With all of the tired, exhausted cranky kids.  The best part is that it isn't the time on the trains that takes so long. That would probably be fine once we go everyone settled into place. It is the fact that to transfer between stations from one line to another, you have to hike about 2 miles winding around and around and up and down.  With kids complaining about how tired they are and very heavy 5 year olds demanding to be picked up and carried. Or sitting down and refusing to go any further.  We do use it to get around while inside the city proper and really have no serious complaints. It cost about 20 cents a person for unlimited transfers.  I think they are more modern than the DC metro.  And somebody has offered Violet a seat pretty much every time we ride.  Thank goodness because otherwise she spends a lot of time pretending to be a cat.  This means you crawl about on the floor of the metro (where you can see pools of spit everywhere) and act like you might lick the legs of other passengers.

We do hope that we can problem solve some other workable solutions. Especially once our car arrives. I'm guessing the solution might be that we will end up utilizing a combination of driving and public transportation.  In the meantime, we get to continue playing the Beijing Taxi Roulette game.  Will one pick us all up, will they take us to the 'burbs, will the seat belts work?!  Stay tuned....