Final impressions of Beijing

It's Monday morning in Beijing. This afternoon begins the 18 hour flight back to Houston via Newark. The inbound airplane was 90 minutes late leaving to come here so my flight is showing to be delayed.

There would be enough time for a final shopping trip, at least over to Wangfujing... but I'm out of money and out of energy.

Final impressions of Beijing

• Weekend "Dirt Market" (PanJiaYuan Antique Market)
  Enormous. The city spreads for miles and miles in all directions. The drive up to the Wall at Mutianyu took us about 120km out from the city center... and it was all occupied. Some farmland interspersed but apartments and "suburbs" all the way.
  
• Traffic. All the time. Saturday morning and afternoon, Sunday night, Sunday morning. People going places all the time. And "right of way" is what you take, not something that is given. Pedestrians, bikes, taxis, private cars, and buses all mostly just go where they're going and dare the other to hit them. Saw surprisingly few accidents just lots of near misses.
  
• Air pollution is an issue. I had blogged that it wasn't bad. We had a fluke of the weather that kept a fair breeze blowing most days and so the air was perfectly fine. Yesterday, Sunday, the breezes were absent and you could see and taste the air.
  
• Security everywhere. I don't know if this is the norm. This trip coincided with the once every 5 year congress of the Communist Party of China. A hotel quite near ours was cordoned off with police tape and surrounded by a combination of military guards, uniformed police, and civilians with red arm bands and jackets marked "security". As near as I can tell, the meeting is in a huge edifice called the Great Hall of the People which is more or less across Dong Chang'An Jie (the 12-lane street in front of the hotel).
  
• Lots of manual labor. Saw lots of jobs being done by labor that would be done with some sort of mechanical aid in the West. For example, driving up to Mutianyu on Saturday morning, we would periodically pass someone sweeping the road shoulder with a long broom made of twigs. There didn't seem to be any job in the hotel that didn't have two or three people assigned to it.
  
• Everything is well used. Lots of bicycles, electric bikes, enclosed gas powered tricycles and such. Almost all are battered and rusted.
  
• Clean but dusty. I saw very, very little trash on the streets. But there's also very little sign of streets and public walkways being washed. Kind of a ground in dirt and dust patina on everything. Not helped by the massive amount of construction going on.
  
• CCTV buildings going up
  Construction absolutely everywhere. 24x7. At 10pm on Sunday night we were walking out from the restaurant last night to where we could get a taxi. We passed a crew digging up the street to lay a cable. The cable was being pulled off the spool through the trench by a gang of men. Not just small projects and also not just Olympic projects. There are a mind-boggling number of huge office buildings going up.