A Canadian in Beijing: Recyling = Reincarnation

by Ember Swift on

My room comes with a fantastic windowsill that is large enough to sit on. I often sit there and watch the basketball games while eating lunch or dinner. The ledge stretches to both walls on either side of the window and also serves as great shelf space. On the left side, I keep my non-perishable food items. Behind the curtain, it reminds me of my own pantry at home which is separated by the kitchen by a large curtain there too.

I have been using the right-hand side as my recyclables mortuary.

People told me that there were no recycling facilities in Beijing when I first arrived. I was horrified. Coming from Canada where recycling programs are present in even the smallest rural communities, I couldn’t bear the thought of just chucking out my water bottles and other plastics, glass and used batteries. It actually makes me feel nauseous and sick to my stomach. I even feel that way when I see other people chucking their recyclables no matter where I am and I often retrieve stray bottles from garbage bins and put them in my blue box at home.

So, instead of resignation, I started collecting my recyclables and keeping them in my room. I didn’t have a solution, but I was buying some time. After a while, the pile got much larger than this one and I realized that I had to figure something out or else I’d be overrun by empties before too long.

I asked Traci about recycling in Beijing. She is my American friend who has lived here for thirteen years and who has significant insight into this city. She told me that the program here is quite “organic” and unofficial. “There are bins downtown (as per the above photo) in which recyclables are supposed to go,” she said, “but they are generally taken to the same waste facilities and they aren’t sorted.” Unless they’re claimed first by the people of Beijing who make their living exchanging recyclables for money.

My interest was piqued.

Traci asked me if I’d ever seen elderly people sorting through the garbage. I had. She told me that many people in the city go around and take recyclables from the bins and load them up on their bicycles and ride them to depots where they get about 5 mao per plastic water bottle (less than 1 cent). But ten of those make 1 kuai and, as you may have noticed by my previous posts, one can eat a meal in this city for just a few kuai. Those water bottles would indeed add up to many meals.

This bin seems more honest to me and I found it at a neighbouring (rather ritzy) hotel complex. One side asks for organic waste and the other is for non-organic waste. If recycling isn’t actually picked up by the city and recycled, at least having people put their organic waste into one side is a kinder solution. That way, those who do pick through the trash don’t have to negotiate as many rotting banana peels as they exhume the recyclables, saving them from their useless fate in an urban dump.

Traci also told me that if I look carefully that I may see piles of recyclables beside the bins in separate bags. These are placed by citizens who know that there are people collecting and who want to make their recyclables available to them without their having to dig them out of other waste. I started to look for these separate bags and I definitely noticed them leaning against trash bins and filled solely with plastic or glass bottles. In Traci’s case, she can just put them outside of her apartment door (as residents generally do) and they’re gone by the morning.

The next day, I bagged up my empty water bottles and headed to the market for some snacks. I passed a public garbage bin and I put them with the other bags of recyclables that were leaning against it. Ten minutes later, I walked by the bin again on my way back home. The bin was still full of waste but those bags of recyclables were gone.

I felt immediately relieved. I’m so grateful to know an English-speaking, Chinese-fluent, long-time Beijing resident. Thank you Traci! My conscience felt lighter and I had finally cleaned up the plastic graveyard from my room.

Isn’t recycling a bit like reincarnation? I suppose so! May those bottles enjoy a new life.

There are also people who collect old and broken electronics, cardboard boxes, rubber tires, etc. They go around to businesses and pay a few mao for the opportunity to collect the company’s waste. They then stack up the items on their wide-backed bicycles and move on. At the end of the day, these bikes are laden and full and I have noticed that they are all heading north from Wudaokou. I learned that there are several depots in that direction.

Ah-hah! I’ve been trying to figure out why these bikes are so full and where they’re going! My confusion has now been replaced by understanding, like a cultural puzzle piece that now has found its place. This urban picture is becoming clearer to these foreign eyes and I’m picking up new pieces every day.

On the topic of batteries, a few days later I noticed this bin in my building’s lobby. I stopped and read it more carefully and realized that a battery recycling facility was just in my doorway! As these are hard to find in Canada (though not impossible), I was shocked and grateful at once. I will be taking my batteries downstairs on my way out today.

(And yes, I’m also on the hunt for some good rechargeable batteries this weekend to reduce my waste all the more. I brought my charger but my old reusable batteries no longer have any life in them. Time for some new ones.)

All in all, I’m starting to “get it” and it feels wonderful. One can be conscientious even in a city of great waste and pollution. People are resourceful. It’s great to see that where official solutions are not in place, unofficial solutions thrive. It is reinforcing my belief that there is a movement to make this world a better place in every context, we just have to seek it out and understand its path.

Happy Earth Day, 2007.

A Canadian in Beijing: Digesting the Air in Beijing

by Ember Swift on

Happy Earth Day!

It’s Sunday morning and I am already looking forward to going outside to take a deep breath. I love the weekends in Beijing, not only because I don’t have to go to school, but also because the air is cleaner. Factories are often closed at least one day every weekend and you can see more blue sky and feel a higher oxygen count in the air.

(The above photo was taken a few days ago. During the week, it’s much more grey outside.)

My fellow (Canadian) student and new friend here, David, said it perfectly: “You don’t just breathe the air in Beijing; you digest it.”

He’s so right.

The air quality in this city is atrocious. Internet reports tell me that the air quality in Beijing does more damage to one’s lungs than smoking two packs a day. Most large factories are still burning coal as their main energy source. You can smell and taste the coal dust in the air. That’s what I’m breathing here and there’s not much I can do about it.

Continuing my running effort in this city has been proof. After running, I usually have to cough for a while and I find that there is a greater collection of phlegm in my system than usual.

I’m thinking that this is perhaps why there is so much hacking and spitting in this city! People don’t just spit here; they make deep, guttural sounds to clear their esophagus and then fire huge piles of mucous and saliva onto the sidewalk (or platform or shopping mall floor or out the window of their car onto the street). I have developed an instinct to weave outwards and away from the source of that throat-clearing, body-emptying sound when I hear it. I want to veer from the path of the oncoming phlegm deposit. So far so good!

Many people wear masks when cycling and I believe this helps on the roadways, at least. I will be investing in one for myself this weekend so that I can enjoy cycling with cleaner lungs. At least, slightly. You can filter some air but you’re still ingesting the pollutants no matter what.

One of the English magazines here called Time Out came with an insert flyer for a product called IQAir. It’s a product for air purification designed to filter “99.97% of dust, pollen, pet allergens, smoke, chemicals, gases, odours, spores, bacteria and even viruses.” The pictures on the advertisement are of non-Chinese, Caucasian people and their pets and children. I imagine these kinds of products are very popular here, but I wonder if they’re popular in all communities.

You’d think in a city in which the air quality was the equivalent to smoking nearly two packs of cigarettes a day that people wouldn’t really have the need to smoke! That is, of course, not the case. Smoking is everywhere. The only two places that I have seen ‘No Smoking’ signs (in any language) have been in the subway cars and in the classrooms at the university. You can, however, smoke in the subway walkways and ticket purchase areas and you can also smoke in the hallways at the university. In fact, our dorm rooms simply request that we don’t set the bed on fire.

David told me he quit smoking since coming here and I wondered if he was just trying to neutralize or offset his toxic intake. Sort of like being carbon neutral, if you quit upon arrival to Beijing then your body would probably feel pretty much the same as it did while smoking in Canada and you could feel positive about not making this air quality worse! I’d say it’s pretty hard to quit, though, in a country that so heavily endorses the activity. Malls have full smoking counters (see picture above). Tobacco is available everywhere and it’s pennies a pack.

Sigh.

“Beijingers” are telling me that it’s improved dramatically over the past few years as a result of the Olympics. Pressure from the international community and a commitment to have a “green” Olympics has prompted some serious efforts by the city to plant trees in urban spaces and to convert many coal-powered energy lines to natural gas.

If not the sake of the living world and the survival of our Earth as impetus to clean up an urban environment, the Olympics will do. Good timing on my part.

When travelling out to see the Great Wall two weeks ago, I was amazed at the fields and fields of newly planted trees in the outlying parts of the city, not to mention the incredible use of space. Agricultural fields are now flanked by new trees. New trees line roadways, parking lots, creek beds and narrow strips of land between buildings and crops.

Here in the city, you can likewise see the attempt to plant trees in open spaces. Between the two tallest buildings in Wudaokou, Google and Microsoft, the new trees and tiered flowerbeds create what appears to be a geometric urban park — beautiful as well as functional.

I’ve also heard that factories will be forced to shut down two to three months prior to the Olympic games in 2008. Sounds to me like a last-ditch effort to boost the air quality and reduce the airborne pollutants before the athletes arrive. I’m wondering what these factories and workers will do without productivity and income for as much as three months. Someone suggested they thought that the government would probably compensate the businesses during this time. I wonder why the powers-that-be don’t just help businesses to convert to cleaner, greener practises in the first place. But, coal is a huge industry here, so that suggestion is a surface one in a much deeper and more layered problem that starts and ends with money. Don’t they all?

This Washington Post article talks about the efforts made by the government to “green” this city before summer, 2008. (These days, the colour green has become a verb!) It says that “about 190 steel, cement, chemical, paper and other factories have been dismantled piece by piece and moved away from the city and surrounding areas. Nearly 680 mines in the vicinity have been shut down. Some 4,000 buses and 30,000 taxis with high emissions were retired, and the government is discouraging driving.” Well, I’m not sure about the latter point considering how many cars I see on the road, but it’s good to hear those stats nonetheless.

Will the city continue with this “green focus” after the international community has turned off the spotlight on Beijing?

One can only hope.

Detour Worth Making: Get High in Meteora, Greece

by Willy Volk on

The Greek word meteora means “suspended in the air,” and one look at the images of the monasteries here, and you’ll know why the Greeks named it that. Pretty much in the middle of — but high above! — the country, the rock here has eroded into fantastic, weathered peaks struggling for the heavens.

The monasteries of Meteora were originally settled by monks who lived in caves lower down the rocks during the 11th Century. Over time, however, to avoid conflicts in the rest of the region, the monks retreated up the rock face until they were living on virtually inaccessable peaks that they built on by bringing material and people up via ladders and baskets.

Today, six monasteries remain, and all of them are open to visitors. Many people who visit Meteora stay overnight either in nearby towns, though there is limited accommodation in Meteora. Buses to Kalampaka are available from Ioannina, Trikala, Thessaloniki and Athens, and trains run there, too.

For a little information about each monastery, check out Greece Travel. For some stunning images, check out Tom Dempsey’s photo gallery or, of course, Flickr.

Eating Around the World in 80 Days

by Erik Olsen on

Conde Nast Traveler has given the Toronto-based food and travel writer Mark Schatzker pretty much the best job in the world. In a nod to both culinary-minded adventure-types and Jules Verne, he’s going to travel around the world in 80 days, largely eating everything in sight and keeping a stately pace (never over 100 miles an hour) so as to savor the moment. I suppose you could also say this is a nod to the sow food movement, except for the rush around the world in 8 days part. Schatzker is apparently on day 40, blog-wise, and writes about Moscow’s “fairytale, onion-domed masterpiece” the St. Basil’s Cathedral. He’s also been to Nevada and California and a gazillion other places so far and just writing about this makes me insanely jealous. I mean, how does one get a job like this?

A Canadian In Beijing: A Shu-in for Language Training

by Ember Swift on

School is… school. It’s hard, but it’s helpful. It’s work, but it’s bringing pleasure. It’s a commitment, but it’s enabling a freedom that I couldn’t have predicted.

I am a part-time student at the “Beijing Yuyan Daxue,” or Beijing Language and Culture University in Wudaokou, a suburb of Beijing. Above is a picture of the southern campus gates.

Every day, I wake up at about 7:15 in the morning, shower, get dressed, make tea and then take my bag and leave my dorm. I have to walk about ten minutes from my building to the classroom and I grab my breakfast en route. There are kiosks between here and there. One sells fresh fruits and I buy two bananas everyday, which costs me 3 kuai. The other sells hot buns and various other non-vegan items. I buy “su baozi” or vegetable dumplings, which are more like thin rolls filled with vegetables and the occasional chunk of egg that I pick out and leave for the birds. They cost me 5 mao each but I usually get two, which amounts to 1 kuai. All in all, my breakfast costs me 4 kuai, or just under $0.60 Canadian.

With my bananas in my bag, my tea in my travel cup in one hand and my warm “su baozi” in the other, I enter the classroom building and mount four flights to my classroom. Everyday, we greet each other with “ni hao” and smiles and we’re all getting to know one another as we move forward with this language.

I haven’t been a student for nine years. I mean, an “officially enrolled” student. Of course, I’ve been learning constantly and that includes lots of reading and research and discussion about lots of different topics. I’d consider myself a student by nature even without an official student card. Our student cards actually look more like mini passports. They have photos and covers and are very formal-looking.

In some ways, being enrolled somewhere is an experience that has been hard to get re-accustomed to. Having to wake up early, for example, has been tough for my nocturnal self. I have taken to afternoon naps to recover from late-nights and I have been a slave to the caffeine in my morning green tea. I’d also say that the studying outside of class has been hard to be disciplined about, too. After I’ve gone to school and napped, I always want to explore this city and not sit over my books for a few more hours. I’m having to push myself to get the homework done and I haven’t always been successful.

My classes begin at 8:00 am everyday, five days a week, and they go until noon. They consist of two hours of grammar and textual understanding and then two hours of conversation classes, which rotate between a listening and pronunciation class that happens twice a week. We have breaks every hour for about ten minutes and then a longer break at ten a.m. for about twenty minutes.

Everything is in Chinese. All instructions and all descriptions of meaning and all definitions of words are in Chinese. Everyone in the class comes with their dictionaries in case a word is introduced and the definition makes no more sense than the word itself. Sometimes looking up a word and finding the translation in one’s native language is the easiest way to understand it and I am often flipping through my dictionary to catch up with the teacher.

There are about eight levels here and I am in about the fifth level — pretty much right in the middle. I have been slotted in an intermediate class as a result of my previous foundation for this language. I share a class with nineteen other students who also have prior background of varying degrees. Some have studied Mandarin before in their home countries (like I have) and others have taken lower level courses here at this university or at privately owned smaller schools here in Beijing.

One student is a Chinese woman who was raised in Switzerland and whose main language is French. She spoke Mandarin with her parents at home but never learned to read or write. As a result, she is quick to understand what’s going on verbally but slow to understand what has been written in the texts or on the blackboard. It is this student who I regularly access if I have questions about something the teacher has said. She and I speak French together in those moments. My second language has truly come in handy here.

Otherwise, I am the only student in the class whose mother tongue is English. If I need help understanding something, the best I can do is speak with that one student in French. Otherwise, I have to resort to speaking in Chinese with everyone else. Sometimes we have lunch together and it is a lunch of choppy, remedial Chinese but a chance to help one another be understood.

Here are the cultures represented by my class: Nine students are from Korea, three are from Indonesia, two are from Japan, two are from Italy, two are from Thailand, one is from Switzerland and one is from Canada – me! (Not all of the students were present when the above picture was taken.)

For the most part, I’m really enjoying it. I have already started using the new vocabulary in my non-school life. For instance, I had to look into some train tickets for the upcoming May holiday (hoping to get to Shanghai!) and I utilized most of the words we were taught in a previous chapter about “holidays.” It was fun to put those words to use and to know that they were the right expressions before I launched into guessing and gestures – a dangerous miming game that often leads to more confusion in Chinese. (This is the kind of language where guessing at words is often a dismal failure. Trust me, I’ve tried it.)

I’ve also had a good time with my fellow students and teachers. After class, I helped one of my teachers with some of her writing in English, for instance, which was rewarding because it had felt like forever since I was considered an “expert” in a language! We are also doing a big class meal this week that is being prepared by the Korean students at one of their apartments. They are excited to introduce me to Korean vegetarian food.

Finally, I think I’m learning how to be funny in Chinese.

Many of the words in this language are the same sound, just different tones. For instance, the word “brother-in-law” is “shu(1) shu(1)” (tones are marked in parentheses); the verb “to count” is “shu(3)”; a way of saying “several” or “a few” is “shu(4)”; and “book” is “shu(1)” (again, another first tone but a different character than the one for “brother-in-law.”) Side note: In English, the words “shoo” and “shoe” sound the same but are very different, so context is everything in both languages!

So a few days ago, I asked the pronunciation teacher (in Chinese, of course) if the following was a grammatically correct sentence: “the brother-in-law counted up the books.” In Chinese, the sentence sounds like: “shu shu shu shu shu” (but I did pronounce the tones!) There was a pause in the classroom and then everyone laughed. When the laughter trailed off, the teacher told me that it technically did work as a sentence but was not exactly a common one! And then she smiled.

Well, I guess not. Otherwise, things could get confusing very quickly!