Last seen on a Facebook wall

I am single handedly democratizing China. Not really, just kidding. I don't know what kind of notions you have about China, but Beijing is alright. The first thing that got to me was the sky--even on a sunny day, it's not deep blue, but kind of a pale blue. We did get to see a real deep blue sky last Saturday, but that was the only time so far. A lot of the time it's been raining, which apparently is created by the government as a way to battle air pollution. [Edit: During my 8-week stay, I saw what I consider to be a true blue sky a total of three times, including the last day I was there--the news media made a huge deal of the first blue day of the Olympics.]

Food is cheap. I can get too much to eat for about US$1.50. I can get a pretty fancy meal for $5. Bottled drinks are generally around 50¢. I've actually gotten used to it now, so any meal over 10元 (~$1.50) is more than I want to spend.

I hadn't found any real internet restrictions until yesterday. What happened at times was that while surfing the 'net my connection to certain websites would suddenly be reset (even if I had just been on that site) but it would always come back shortly. Yesterday I found out that Chinese Wikipedia is completely blocked. I just get a "connection was reset" error if I try. English Wikipedia, however, is completely fine, and I can read all about historical Chinese oppression with no obstacles. [Edit: As the Olympics approached, Chinese Wikipedia was unblocked, perhaps a result of international journalistic pressure. Wordpress and Livejournal, however, were blocked during my entire stay. Blogger, curiously, was not; I get the feeling they struck some sort of deal with the Chinese government--the navbar was automatically Chinese when I looked at Blogspot pages (like this one).]

The whole city is a huge construction site. There is a mind boggling amount of construction going on, everywhere. Things get done FAST here; work goes on 24 hours a day, and I watched a whole strip of road get rebuilt in like 2 days, the kind of thing that takes like a month in the US. The workers here have pretty sad stories; they're migrant workers with homes in the countryside, who take on work in substandard conditions as it pays better than farming. I've seen their living quarters, temporary little shacks or tents adjacent to the construction sites.

At the same time there is a middle class in Beijing that appears to be trying pretty hard to mimic American excess. I've been to a few bars/clubs with people I've met; they're packed with strobe lights and flashing lasers and ridiculous thundering sound systems and drinks and fog machines and visualizations on the walls and bouncing floors and scores of young people and some creepy older people all coming together to form a cacophonous mass of excess.

Actually that's only truly applicable for the last place I went to. It was ridiculous.