distant ruminations

Like I said last night, the weekend meant spending an awful lot of time sitting in the back of miandis. Half of that time was spent on more or less normal tripping around Yanqing, to and from the county town, although the first trip, from Dongguan up to the village, meant a stop-off at the Rishang wholesale market to stock up on the huge crates of baijiu and Pepsi we’ll be handing out to the extended in-laws over Spring Festival as well as as much of the meat and fish and other Spring Festival necessities that can be bought in advance and hadn’t yet been bought. That might perhaps have been more interesting had I not been under orders to just sit in the miandi and wait- lzh knows too well how grumpy I can get in crowded markets. Still, it looked like the kind of place I could enjoy in carefully measured doses.

Rishang is huge and incredibly crowded. Now, look at a map of Beijing and note how large  an area Yanqing County covers. Then think: there’s only 200-odd thousand people in Yanqing. Those are some pretty impressively uncrowded stats for the eastern half of China. But then again, Rishang seemed a lot like Chaoyang’s Dongjiao (Eastern Suburbs) Market, just half a k south of Soho, Blue Castle, and Huamao: It has everything. And it’s all wholesale. Except I would guess, from the short time I spent sitting in the back of a miandi in Rishang, that Rishang is even bigger than Dongjiao. And judging by the types of vehicles- basically everything you’ll ever see on a Chinese road- and the licence plates, there was an equal mix of producers, sellers and buyers present, mostly locals and Hebeiren, but with some from further afield. And just like Dongjiao, I’m pretty sure that you could have decorated a large house and fitted out a five star restaurant and kept both abundantly supplied shopping solely at that market.

Yeah, Yanqing doesn’t lack for much.

Anyway, that was Saturday, and it was pretty uneventful, really: The miandi was loaded up, we headed out to the village, the miandi was unloaded.

Sunday morning we were woken up bright and early, as per usual. It’s hard to sleep in when you’re sharing a kang with peasants who’ve been getting up before the crack of dawn their entire lives. Apparently a local miandi had been booked to show up at 8:30, and he arrived just as we were scoffing down our fried rice breakfast. I’d only had time to get in about half of my matinal tea consumption. The baijiu and Pepsi and some other bits and pieces destined for Jiujiu and Jiuma and the household of some distant rellie of Ma’s parents’ generation were loaded into the miandi, Ba had to hold Zaizai back as Ma, lzh and myself piled in (Zaizai never likes to be left at home, especially when lzh and I are going anywhere, and has even developed the habit of jumping into the passenger seat of Ba’s bengbengche as soon as Ba starts to crank it up). Then we backed away from the detritus of the frozen, broken and apparently fixed water main, and took a slight detour before hitting the highway and heading out westwards.

I’d been out west of the village along State Highway 110 before, but only as far as one of lzh’s high school friends’ husband’s village, which is only slightly further west of the last Zhangshanying Township government building, and down further into the basin, and only for that one wedding, so I hadn’t really seen much of what was west of the village before.

For the sake of my ease of typing: State Highway 110/110国道 will henceforth be referred to as G110.

As you take G110 northwestwards from Yanqing County Town, there ain’t a whole lot to see. The County Town stretch is mostly lined with businesses aimed at the transport sector: restaurants, petrol stations, and garages mostly specialising in the repair of the trucks that form probably the largest sector of the transport making its way up and down G110. Then you leave the County Town stretch and it’s mostly just regular rural northern China up until the Longqingxia turnoff/Shijinglong skifield. There’s an estate of ‘fancy’ (tacky as hell when you get up close) villas and a regular apartment block area up there. Then you’re back to regular rural northern China, broken up by a driving school and the occasional petrol station, restaurant or garage, the petrol stations, restaurants and garages being in a wide variety of states of repair, disrepair and abandonment. There’s also what looks suspiciously like a vineyard to me, and I’ve always been curious about the potential for vineyards up in that part of the country…. but mostly it’s regular rural northern China: Fields and orchards interspersed with villages that look a bit rough round the edges, but definitely habitable. And then the Zhangshanying Township town itself, which is actually several villages grown together, combines all of those services aimed at the passing trucks with those for the local residents: There are also various kinds of general store (some focussing more on hardware, some more supermarketish, but the combination covering basically every need), pharmacies, a bathhouse, the township hospital, schools covering kindergarten to high school (but mostly empty: increasingly prosperous families are doing all they can to send their kids into County Town or downtown Beijing schools where they’ll get better access to better resources and teachers and more opportunities- same story in every country, ay?), and village and township government facilities. But apart from that one wedding, that’s about as far west as I had gone up that road until yesterday.

First up, both lzh and I were surprised to discover that the new “truck lane” (in reality, a separate highway) for the G110 as it runs through Yanqing had only been finished as far as Zhangshanying Township, and the trucks had to go back onto the old G110 from, I think, about the intersection with the road that runs over the reservoir to Kangzhuang. That road meets the G110 just at the western edge of Zhangshanying Township, and the intersection of the two roads has the only set of traffic lights I’ve seen northwest of Yanqing County Town.

So we were back to the bad old days of driving along beside a road we desperately wished would be finished already. But there weren’t too many trucks on Sunday morning (were the drivers all in church? Somehow I don’t think so).

Now, the air quality wasn’t the best this weekend. The problem with Yanqing and (it would seem from my few hours’ experience) Huailai, is that they lie in a basin completely surrounded by mountains. Beijing itself, at least, is open to the south and east. Yanqing opens into Huailai; Huailai opens into Yanqing. There isn’t much heavy industry up there, but there’s a huge transportation industry that passes through. For one thing: The basin has always been the main route between Beijing and parts northwest, and the modern roads have followed the ancient routes. Just ask Genghis Khan: He’d be amazed at all the modern stuff along the sides of the road and the crops like corn, potatoes, tomatoes, chillies and peanuts imported from the Americas, but he’d still recognise the old route from the Zhangjiakou area down along the southern side of the Guanting Reservoir through Kangzhuang and Badaling to Juyongguan. He used the same route himself on the way to harrassing the Jin Dynasty, after all. At least once. So anyway, transportation between Beijing and the industrial cities of northwestern Hebei (Zhangjiakou) northern Shanxi (Datong) and central Inner Mongolia (Hohhot and Baotou) and parts further afield is a big industry in the basin. There’s also a major railway running from Datong to Qinhuangdao which crosses Yanqing. So naturally there’s a fair amount of emissions from transport. Add to that emissions from central heating in urban areas and cooking and heating fires in the far larger rural areas and the (mostly very light, from what I’ve seen) industry in the basin, and yes, there is air pollution. It is not as bad as Beijing’s air pollution, and even on days when the visibility seems as bad as Beijing’s, your lungs still work easier.

Perhaps a bigger issue, visibility wise, was the murkiness of the miandi’s windows.

Whatever, one way or another, I couldn’t see terribly far beyond the sides of G110, and on occasions, the northern mountains whose base G110 hugs pretty tightly were difficult to make out. But still, on the way out to Huailai, the view out the (incredibly murky) windows of the miandi was a bit of a shock. I was expecting more of the same scenery you see from the County Town out to Zhangshanying Township. Yeah, most of the way up to the Beijing/Hebei border that’s what I saw, but there were a couple of sections of the same kind of truckie-focussed services you see along the county town stretch of G110, one of which looked so thoroughly abandoned I almost expected to see tumbleweed blowing down the street.

And then we reached the border, where the railway and the “truck lane” under construction swap places with G110, moving up to the north, closer to the mountains, while G110 takes a more southerly route lower in the basin. And from there on out the two sides of G110 looked like and extended series of very rundown truckstops. The roadsides were wide and rough truckparks covered in black dust- black, no doubt, from the sheer volume of diesel exhaust, with the coal hauled by more than a few of the trucks helping out. The garages were as filthy as you would expect any business dedicated to the maintenance and repair of heavy duty diesel engines to be. The restaurants looked like the garages. And this stretched on for several kilometres.

After a bit we ducked off the highway at a gap between the series of truckstops into a village and made our way through the lanes to Jiujiu’s home.

The village didn’t look too bad; like any village in Yanqing really, which is hardly surprising, but the lanes were unpaved and the buildings looked dirtier and rougher. And Jiujiu’s home was about half the size of lzh’s parents’ place, both in terms of courtyard and the main building. In fact, I don’t remember seeing any buildings along the eastern or western walls of the courtyard, and I don’t see how you could build any, considering how small the courtyard was. And it was confirmed that no level of government higher than Yanqing County, or perhaps at a stretch, the Beijing Municipality, had ordered the building of the new foot-pump-operated flush squatters everybody in our village now has in their courtyards. Jiujiu’s toilet is, as always, in the southwestern corner of the courtyard, surrounded by a wall built to roughly Chinese-average-knee-height, and an extremely short drop. So yeah, in winter, you get a lasting record of everything you eat and how well your gut processed it. And you get to re-read that record every time you use the toilet. And you wonder why I don’t sympathise with those who feel uncomfortable with Beijing’s public toilets.

The next extended in-law we visited, well, I can’t remember her position in the family, but her house wasn’t much different. I was surprised by the lay-out, though: Along the northern wall was the main building, as usual, but that occupied the centre, and on the sides were smaller rooms that did not form a part of the main apartment. There were structures along the western and southern walls, but I think they were as much of this rellie’s age compared to Jiujiu, and they were pretty rough and ready compared to the rest of the house.

Anyway, visits made, gifts given, our miandi came back at the appointed time, and we piled in and headed back for Yanqing. This time, though, one of the market places was full, and the side of the highway outside that market was crowded with various forms of two-wheeled transport, powered by petrol, electricity, or good old-fashioned muscle, all mixing it up with an ever-increasing number of trucks whose drivers had decided on one last pit-stop before Beijing.

Alright, so I haven’t described that one, small slice of Huailai I saw in a way that makes you think “tourist paradise” or “Wow, I could retire there!”, but I have to say this: I saw two apparently distinct economies operating there: The regular local agriculture; and the long-distance transport services. There was ample evidence of a large, local population independent of the truckies and the services they need, and there was ample evidence of a large, local population making their livings off the truckies. Add in the clear linguistic differences with Yanqing, and what would seem to be a slide towards Jin as you move northwestwards, and I’m intrigued. Actually, I wouldn’t mind spending a bit more time exploring Huailai. Of course, I could quite happily spend a lot more time exploring Yanqing as well….

Oh, and lzh, who hadn’t been up to Huailai for several years, said two things of interest:

1. “This is what Yanqing was like when I was a kid, but Yanqing has developed since then.”
2. “Whatever’s popular in Hebei moves to Yanqing. They had satellite TV before we got it, so you’ll see more satellite dishes out here, for example.”

In answer to the first statement, Ma pointed out that all the wealth in Hebei moves to Beijing, leaving Hebei in its more or less undeveloped state. Shanxi coal mine owners seem to follow the same pattern.

As for the second statement, well, it’s hard to see at first glance, but remember that Hebei’s wealth, like Shanxi’s, tends to gravitate towards Beijing.

It’s odd that this gravitation of wealth would seem to leave Yanqing apparently so much better off than its basin-mate Huailai. You’d think that Yanqing’s wealth would also gravitate to Beijing, but it seems Yanqing’s biggest export to Beijing is taxi drivers, especially those basing themselves around Haidian District.

I’ve spent more time sitting in the back of Yanqing’s miandi fleet this weekend than should generally be considered healthy. I also managed to go to Hebei for the very first time.

Yes, that second sentence should be considered extremely silly considering how long I’ve lived in north China, seven out of my eight years here having been spent in Taiyuan, Beijing and Tianjin, and I have passed through Hebei a gazillion times, but nevertheless, unless you count the scheduled pit stops the Taiyuan-Beijing buses make on the side of the expressway just outside of Shijiazhuang, it is true.

And I think it is safe to say it was one of the less ordinary introductions to Hebei, although nothing particularly out of the ordinary happened.

This will be our first Spring Festival since the wedding. The civil ceremony doesn’t count, you see, only the proper ceremony and party with the family. So this means that we have no choice but to visit every single member of the extended family bearing many gifts. lzh’s mother actually comes from Hebei, and so lzh decided to get the Hebei round of visits out of the way early. The transport isn’t so convenient, apparently, even though it’s only Huailai, the next county over, and not too far into Huailai, either. It seems the Yanqing county buses only go as far as Xiaying, the western-most village along Yanqing’s section of State Highway 110, and you have to find some other form of transport from there over to Huailai. Of course, hiring a miandi is always possible, but that is naturally harder to do during Spring Festival, when the miandi drivers also want to be spending time with their families, and neither of us really wanted to deal with all the fuss the presence of a big nose would create when everybody’s home for the holidays, and so it was decided we’d hire a miandi and head out there this morning to get the visits out of the way with the minimum hassle. The rest of the extended in-laws are a bit easier to deal with, all being in Yanqing, and mostly in more or less the same village.

Funny thing is, even though Yanqing and Hualai are right next to each other and share the same basin, they do have different accents. I can’t tell you terribly much about the Huailai accent, because I still can’t distinguish it from the Yanqing accent (although lzh and all her family members can, and her mum can be persuaded to speak Huailaihua). All I can tell you right now is that in Huailai 喝 is pronounced ha4 and 吃 cha4. lzh just told me that 吃饭了没有？is pronounced cha4 fan4 le mayou2, with  没/ma being apparently a neutral tone, very unstressed and very short, and the 有 stressed and quite long.

It’s odd, we’d travelled maybe ten kilometres, we were still in the same basin, at the base of the exact same mountain range, and yet there were clear linguistic differences.

And one linguistic mystery was cleared up. We were visiting Jiujiu and Jiuma (mother’s younger brother and his wife). Jiuma comes from Hebei, but she has such an incredibly thick and almost indecipherable accent that I don’t really think I can say she speaks Putonghua. And there have been several occasions on which only Jiujiu has understood her, so it’s not my own linguistic incompetence that’s getting in the way here. Anyway, she’s from Hebei, but up until today, nobody could tell me where, exactly. Well, after reading the Wikipedia article on the Jin language sometime last summer (one of a long series of tangents leading off a project I still haven’t finished), I got to wondering if she was from somewhere up the other side of Zhangjiakou, closer to Shanxi. And today for some reason some aspects of her accent started reminding me ever so vaguely of Taiyuan… which is strange, because I learnt basically nothing the entire year I spent there. Anyway, today I finally got a clear answer, and as it turns out, I was right. She’s from Yuxian, right up on the Shanxi border. So I guess her native language is Jin. And I would have to say that judging by the thickness of her accent (a knife would not suffice, you’d need a chainsaw to cut it- honestly, I’ve had less trouble understanding people in Hunan, Guangxi and Yunnan than her, and that is no exaggeration) she doesn’t speak Putonghua so much as Huailaihua-ised Jin.

Well, yes, Yanqinghua and Huailaihua are just dialects of Mandarin, and aren’t too difficult for those with a basic grounding in Putonghua or one of the more “standard” (meaning “bigger”, I guess- Tianjinhua would actually be surprisingly useful for understanding Yanqinghua) Mandarin dialects. But Jin is something else entirely, as evidenced by Jiuma’s accent.

I can only remember a couple of examples: Whether we would go back to Huailai at Spring Festival was discussed. lzh and Ma said in Yanqing accents: 过年不回来了, which sounds pretty much as it does in Putonghua. Jiuma said: 过年不来了吗?, but somehow that 来/lai2 had become lei4. I heard a similar thing happening with 快, becoming kuei instead of kuai, and something odd (although I could be remembering that wrong) happening to the tone. Something strange happened with 啤酒, too, the pi being longer and sounding kinda first tone-ish, and the jiu sounding more like jiew (like jew, but with an “ee” sound inserted), and also being quite long. And she seemed to be trying to teach her step-grandson to say “goo” instead of 狗, but who knows, that could’ve been “baby talk”.

But what really gets me about Jiuma’s accent is that insted of the usual confusion of s/sh, z/zh and c/ch/similar sounds you get in just about every Sinitic language and dialect outside of Beijing, she seems to blend all of those consonants into one thoroughly confusing mess. At least, that’s how it sounds to my thoroughly unpracticed ear.

Ah well, I’m pretty tired, there is more to write, but I’m going to leave it at this for now. The very amateur linguistics is covered (I really should get back to school and get some proper training before I continue).

I dislike the noisy, crowded, touristy places. I love the boring places. The boring places, the ordinary, every-day regular parts of town where the faceless masses of ordinary people live and work and play, are by far the most interesting places to be. You can come to Beijing and spend your days travelling around the Great Wall and Ming Tombs and Summer Palace and Forbidden City and Temple of Heaven, setting some time aside for fake shopping in Yaxiu, the Silk Market and Hong Qiao, and your evenings partying at Sanlitun and Houhai, and it won’t matter how long you spend doing that, a week, a month, a year, you’ll still know nothing about this fair city. And neither the forgotten parts of the city nor the little known corners will get you much closer- slightly closer, but not much. That’s why I like this little corner of Beijing, and even more the maze of lanes and alleys stretching west of here, across Wusheng Lu (which has to be my all-time favouritest street in China), over to the Third Ring, from Huawei Qiao up through Panjiayuan to Jinsong Qiao. It’s boring. There’s nothing to do here, no reason to visit unless you’re visiting me (and you’re more than welcome), it’s just ordinary, everyday Beijing, the way the real city is. There’s a time and a place for all the touristy stuff, but in general it’s that boring, mundane, ordinary city that I’m interested in. And so yesterday afternoon was spent getting up close to Beijing’s history while avoiding as strenuously as is humanly possible anything that had even the slightest whiff of “tourist” about it, and it was good.

And before we continue: I think the reason I am starting to appreciate the CBD is that it is rapidly becoming an ordinary part of Beijing, nothing particularly special. Several strata up the socio-economic ladder than lzh and I can afford to spend much time in, but still, it’s growing into a real part of Beijing.

It’s a pity that yesterday’s goodness had to framed by unpleasantness. But nevermind, that’s how things go.

So I escaped unpleasantness round one, a kind of unpleasantness discussed here, and headed round to Fangzhuang to pick up Matt, then we walked down to Liujiayao to get on the Line 5 subway.

Line 5 is nice. It’s all super sparkly and shiny and clean and new. And the glass anti-suicide walls along the sides of the platform make you feel so safe. And the trains themselves are so spacious and comfortable and clean and smooth- real smooth. I think that short trip up to Chongwenmen was by far my best ever (so far, at least) experience of the Beijing subway system. Now I can’t wait till Line 10 opens this summer- Line 10’s southern terminus is just up the road from here at Jinsong Qiao, and it’ll follow the Third Ring northwards past Gongti Beilu and Nongzhanguan… and yeah, it’ll be real convenient for getting to Sanlitun. I can’t see any other use for me for Line 10. Well, that Gongti Beilu stop will be convenient for lzh getting to and from work, but Jinsong is a bit much of a walk for a daily commute…

So, anyway, we got out at Chongwenmen and walked up to the Ming Dynasty City Wall Park, the park holding the last remaining section of the Ming and Qing Dynasty City Wall. Kinda explains the name of the place, doesn’t it? Well, in most respects, it’s not much of a tourist destination, just this 1.5 km section of ruined city wall with grass and scrub growing out the top set in a very ordinary park.  But only a few years ago it was the ruined section of wall mostly concealed behind one-storey buildings that I would call shanties had they not been made of brick and more-or-less a permanent and generally accepted part of Beijing’s cityscape of the time. It was one of those rundown, filthy, low-rent and yet established post-’49 communities that can still be found in the poorer parts of Beijing (the film 《苹果》(Lost in Beijing) provides a good close-up or two of one such community along with a stark contrast with the CBD) but the slum was cleared and became the park, plaques were added explaining the historical significance of the park, and the result….

Well, I wanted to go there because I’d seen what it was, and many times I’ve been past the new park, and yet I’d never gotten up close and personal with the park and the wall, so I just wanted to wander through and have a nosey and see what it’s like.

And so yes, just like the almost totally fruitless search for the temple the day before yesterday, my motives for leading Matt on this particular wild goose chase were purely selfish. Sorry Matt. Next time you can choose the destinations.

And even though it’s a very ordinary park, it’s a very nice, pleasant little place for a stroll. And it’s one of those rarest of things: A park that has no fence, no walls, no ticket office, just totally open and free for all. Well, there is one section that is fenced off and charges 10 yuan to enter, at the eastern end, guarding the entrance to the watchtower and the Red Gate Gallery, but unless you need access to the tower or you’re there for the art, I don’t see the need to bother going in. The open part of the park is more than adequate.

And it’s not just a nice place for a stroll, even in the depths of winter (although had we gone there in the winds of the day before yesterday, it would’ve been horrifically painful, especially for Californian Kunming-dweller Matt), but they’re also done a good job of presenting the wall and its significance. Spaced out more or less evenly along the wall are large, black marble plaques, mostly bilingual, and mostly with a photo of the wall in the late 19th or early 20th centuries engraved, explaining this or that point of the wall, or the signal station that has been preserved with the wall, or the railway that used to pass along there on the way down to the old railway station at Qianmen. And I have to say that most of the English translations were very well done, with only a few minor awkwardities here and there, but otherwise decent-quality English.

Well, we got to the watchtower end and decided against paying 10 kuai to go through the the gate that had been punched in the wall to allow trains through. I felt no need to go to the tower, and I had no particular interest in visiting the gallery, and nor did Matt see any point in going in, so we wandered around the outside, northwards, then hung a left down towards Beijing Zhan, but turned northwards before we got ourselves too surrounded by travellers, crossing over Chang’an Jie then walking up Nan Xiaojie northwards from the International Hotel.

This is a tangent, but it explains my interest in that part of Beijing: A few years ago, when he was still fairly regularly generous to foreign teachers (because he had only one foreign teacher), my boss took me to lunch in the revolving restaurant on top of the International Hotel. Now, that, sitting in a revolving restaurant, is the most migrainatory way to eat I have ever come across, especially when the food is that fancy hotel buffet highly-refined, incredibly bland rubbish. But anyway, it’s a good way, if you can stave off the impending migraine, to get a good view over the old city- on a clear day, of course, and that day was a clear day. So I was sitting there trying to eat and I noticed in the hutongs north of the International Hotel and east of Nan Xiaojie a decidedly European-looking house and, in a separate hotel just a little further north, a small temple. Not long afterwards, I found that temple, but arrived too late to get a look inside. And Beijing’s old Western buildings fascinate me, and no, I’m not referring to the cathedrals. They’re mostly buried down hutongs, and most of them in only slightly better repair than the Siheyuan around them. Well, Dongjiao Minxiang is a good street to walk down for its Western architecture, being the old legation quarter, but to be honest, as well looked-after as the buildings are now (or were last time I walked down that way), I’m not convinced they’re going to survive Beijing’s development. But the most fascinating of the Western buildings are the almost purely random ones you stumble across buried down some old, unrestored and somehow not yet 拆ed hutong.  I’m really curious about these buildings.

See, it’s Tianjin that’s famous for Western architecture in the old International Settlements, not Beijing. Beijing is famous for Chinese stuff. And yet here these buildings are, sitting buried deep in hutongs, no doubt with more than a few stories to tell, and it seems nobody’s asking. Or maybe I just haven’t been looking in the right places yet. And these buildings, where they are in the last remaining intact hutong communities, are very much a part of that community infrastructure. They don’t look at all out of place, they stand out by their ordinariness, by their total integration into the surrounding community.

This time I found that European building I’d spotted from the top of the International Hotel, and found it firmly behind a high wall. Didn’t find the temple again, but that may be because we didn’t go deep enough into the hutongs. Doesn’t matter, the point was simply to get out and walk around, I mean, I didn’t see any sense in wasting yesterday’s brilliant weather and clear air, and the Ming Wall was just an excuse to get out, really.

But looking northwards up Nan Xiaojie from the International Hotel was the quintessential contemporary Beijing. On the eastern side of the street, immediately north of the Hotel, was a destruction site. Presumably that will soon be Just Another Fancy Real Estate Development. Then there was a small section of as yet unmolested hutong. Then there was Just Another Fancy Real Estate Development. The western side of the street wasn’t much different, except that there was more intact hutongs. There was also another of these apparently random European-looking buildings behind a wall, right by the street, bordering what looked like another destruction site, right at the southern end of the remaining hutongs. Once again, I was intrigued.

Well, by this time we’d done enough walking, it was getting time for a break, so after much humming and hahing we jumped on the subway and went up to Dawanglu then made for O’Farrells. Then lzh heard where we were, and thought, hey, that’s on the way home, and there’s lots of shops with 漂亮的衣服 (pretty clothes, and one of her favourite Chinese phrases) for me to sift through, so she said she’d meet us there. Then Brendan showed up, closely followed by Matt’s host, and food and drink was consumed and good conversation was had, and it was a good time…. but of course some arsehole taxi driver had to make sure it ended on a sour note for lzh and I by being a dick. I’ve been having bad luck with cabbies lately. It’s frustrating because the overwhelming majority of Beijing’s cabbies are decent, honest folk, but there’s still that small but disproportionately loud and obnoxious group who go out of their way to give the whole of Beijing’s taxi industry the worst name possible.

So it was a good day, but I’m still irritated that it had to start and end with such unpleasantness.  No sense in getting upset about it, though, because in between was an entire day filled with exercise in a pleasant environment and unusually comfortable (for Beijing) air, excellent company, good food and drink, good conversation…  A successfully spent day, in other words.