I've taken on the unholy task of teaching a 6:45 am yoga class across town. In Boulder, no problem-- lemme just hop on my super awesome bicycle and I'll be there in a flash. (or the bus!) But in Beijing, it's more like--oh God, there are just so many potential problems. It is my great luck, however, to live near both a subway stop and a bus station, and only a minutes walk to a busy street with many a taxi. So I've been taking a taxi at 6:15 to arrive just before class begins, over on the East Third Ring Road.
(I live off the West Second Ring Road. Beijing is built like this: (((((*))))) The Forbidden City and Tianamen Square are the center, "downtown" areas, and then there's a circle road around it-the First Ring Road. Then follows the Second Ring Road, Third Ring Road, Fourth Ring Road, and lastly, the bane of my existence and where I spend most days teaching yoga, the Fifth Ring Road, out near the airport.)
By subway however, it's a difficult and annoying trek. My stop, Jishuitan, is on line 2, which is a circle line. If I want to go anywhere outside the circle, I have to transfer, usually more than once. And the problem with finishing a yoga class on the south side of the East Ring Road is rush hour traffic headed west. Twice now I've stood out on the corner flailing my arms at 8am at any taxi that passes. No takers. This morning, I sought other means. Walking to Shuangjing, the station, proved difficult. Weird traffic flows, two false taxi alarms (actually got into one as the cabbie was trying to tell me not to) and a biting wind.
So. That was an entry I began way back in Feb sometime. I still have the unholy task of teaching yoga at 6:45am, but luckily for me, my amazing manfriend Benjamin just moved into a new office/apartment right above a subway station in the center of town! Not only do I get to sleep on the 22nd floor of a beautiful new apartment, I also don't have to leave until 6:30 to get to class fifteen minutes later! It's perfect. Way better location for all the things I need to do in Beijing, and cuts down on my cab fare. Excellent!
But. This doesn't change the fact that rush hour is a horrible beast. I still get a little worked up crossing the street, or hailing taxis. Getting on the subway at 8am makes me panicky, and it's usually just way too early for me to be getting touched that much. (Forming lines in China is a relatively new concept--it's really more of a shove and get shoved business. I guess before the Olympics they had certain days of the week where subway employees would force the riders to "practice getting in line". Occasionally they still do, which typically means a teenager with a megaphone yells things and points frantically as people push forward onto the car and more people push back getting off the car.)
It is this kind of thing that splits my personality. I started swearing a lot. I mean, a lot. And not just the regular words, like your shit, your fuck, your damn. I'm talking like, foul, filthy words. And to be totally honest, I already have a pretty foul mouth. I get on the subway and feel such fury at the crowds, an old man openly staring at me, or a woman digging her hands into my back to get past me. I just could not deal with it. Am I normally a patient person? I don't even remember. I've never been faced with an animal like Beijing before. It's the biggest city I've lived in, and it positively overwhelms me at times.
I recently went to Hong Kong for a weekend. The weather was balmier, the streets were less chaotic, English was spoken everywhere. I felt myself relax. Even though Hong Kong Island is smaller, and the skyscrapers and office buildings pour onto the sidewalks and roads, it felt manageable. If I got stuck in a traffic jam in a taxi, I could just say to the driver, Hey, take me to a train station, or, Hey, is there a better way to get around this? No split personality, no scary-road-rage-marie. It forced me to address the way I approached my Beijing life.
So I can't just hop on my super awesome bicycle and get to the place I want to go. I can't get in a taxi and chat with the driver about the fastest way to get from A to B. Taking the subway is at times pretty bad and panic inducing, but I'm a girl from Iowa where there is no public transportation so it's probably pretty natural that crowds scare me. I just have to remember to be patient. And to wash my mouth out with soap.
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Ogden and Colfax. To the East.
Yes, I am once again writing about the 15. The bus. The Vomit Comet, as Wendy once called it. Today was quite a day to leave my iPod at home. The man with the generic Dallas jersey and faded blue hair speaking to his toothless friend about prison sentences, where to meet after work, prison sentences. They're smoking their cigarettes with a sense of urgency--the life of a bus rider is one of constant expectation. The bus will arrive, the bus will arrive, the bus will arrive.
I board the bus with my small pile of lunch from work. The box with the salad, the foil-wrapped wheat bread, the small Styrofoam ramequin filled with balsamic vinaigrette. They were all precariously balanced, and the dressing, predictably, nose-dove to the floor of the incredibly crowded rush hour bus. It bled. I awkwardly recovered it and held it for the rest of the ride. The puddle of brown spread and shifted with the ride.
I finally settled in, and noticed a brown skinned man with a Broncos bandanna covering the majority of his long black hair, sitting five or so passengers away from me. A five year old boy sat restlessly on the bench next to the man, fidgeting, playing with his plastic preying mantis. The boy's mother asked questions, and the man with the bandanna spoke. Difficult to tell if the mother and the man were friends, or bus acquaintances. I can't tell if it matters, for the purposes of this blog, that the two were already friends. The mother hugged the man when she deboarded.
Bandanna spoke about his ankle monitor. His sentence, his parole, his remaining time: 28 days. He said to the woman, "It doesn't matter where you're going, just matters where you are." He spoke about his impending move, his new apartment, his new place. He showed the boy his face mask and construction hat.
It doesn't matter where you're going, just matters where you are. I try to think a bit about the sentence. Cliche, of course, but pertinent in some way. My life is rushing lately. Bending and expanding and shifting. I'm rushing. How Buddhist it is! It matters where we are. It matters where I am. On this bus, sitting next to the only other white women. The one to my left has a City Books tote bag, and the one to my right is reading a food magazine.
Where I am: Denver, City Park Neighborhood, winter, age 24. Where I am: The strange interlude between childhood and adulthood. The interlude that lasts the longest minutes of your life. Minutes that take years and decades. I'm shifting, rushing, going.
The man with the ankle monitor is moving on--28 days he has left, and his new apartment is waiting for him. The young boy reminds his mother of his presence by throwing his small plastic bug across the aisle, and for a moment we are all on the bus. Together. It's where we are. Together.
I board the bus with my small pile of lunch from work. The box with the salad, the foil-wrapped wheat bread, the small Styrofoam ramequin filled with balsamic vinaigrette. They were all precariously balanced, and the dressing, predictably, nose-dove to the floor of the incredibly crowded rush hour bus. It bled. I awkwardly recovered it and held it for the rest of the ride. The puddle of brown spread and shifted with the ride.
I finally settled in, and noticed a brown skinned man with a Broncos bandanna covering the majority of his long black hair, sitting five or so passengers away from me. A five year old boy sat restlessly on the bench next to the man, fidgeting, playing with his plastic preying mantis. The boy's mother asked questions, and the man with the bandanna spoke. Difficult to tell if the mother and the man were friends, or bus acquaintances. I can't tell if it matters, for the purposes of this blog, that the two were already friends. The mother hugged the man when she deboarded.
Bandanna spoke about his ankle monitor. His sentence, his parole, his remaining time: 28 days. He said to the woman, "It doesn't matter where you're going, just matters where you are." He spoke about his impending move, his new apartment, his new place. He showed the boy his face mask and construction hat.
It doesn't matter where you're going, just matters where you are. I try to think a bit about the sentence. Cliche, of course, but pertinent in some way. My life is rushing lately. Bending and expanding and shifting. I'm rushing. How Buddhist it is! It matters where we are. It matters where I am. On this bus, sitting next to the only other white women. The one to my left has a City Books tote bag, and the one to my right is reading a food magazine.
Where I am: Denver, City Park Neighborhood, winter, age 24. Where I am: The strange interlude between childhood and adulthood. The interlude that lasts the longest minutes of your life. Minutes that take years and decades. I'm shifting, rushing, going.
The man with the ankle monitor is moving on--28 days he has left, and his new apartment is waiting for him. The young boy reminds his mother of his presence by throwing his small plastic bug across the aisle, and for a moment we are all on the bus. Together. It's where we are. Together.
Spring Festival Photos
above is a photo snapped on the subway of a family returning from the Ditan Temple Spring Festival Fair, looking how most people in the crowd below must have felt: crushed, defeated, overcrowded. The traffic was unbelievable that day on the roads and on the buss and subway; it was hard to believe there could still be even more people actually at the fair.
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