scribbler at large

We’ve been in Beijing for six months, and so far winter is the least adorable of the three seasons we’ve witnessed. Cold weather and apocalypse air has turned local quirks I used to find charming (like spitting and blowing snot rockets on the street) into something less appealing. Starting around New Year’s Eve, we had eleven straight days of polluted air, during which we stayed indoors, cranked up the air filters in our apartment, and slowly went insane. If you got a doom-preaching text from me over that stretch of days, thanks for listening. It’s the kind of problem that leaks all over everything else—if the air is bad my clothes don’t hang right, my Chinese sucks more than usual, groceries are too heavy, I become convinced that I’ve done nothing with my life, etc etc. But just when my despair reached fever pitch and I was fantasizing about the woods of Maine and Vermont, the skies finally cleared. This whole past week was relatively blue-skied, and now my former despair looks kind of embarrassing. What was my problem, anyway? This isn’t so bad.

Since I haven’t really talked much about the air quality, here’s the briefest of rundowns: throughout China the air is heavily polluted due to a bunch of factors that include coal-fueled power generating plants, cars, and factory emissions. Beijing is surrounded by mountains, so smog can get trapped in the city for days. When this happens, the city looks foggy. Sometimes the pollution in the air is so thick you can’t even see nearby buildings. When we lived in Boston we’d look out the window in the morning to check for rain, but here we do it to see how bad the air is. If I can’t see the building three doors down it’s not worth going outside unless absolutely necessary.

In the summer and fall, we had bad air days—sometimes a few in a row—but not enough to impact our lives much. Winter, on the other hand, is what you might call BIG LEAGUE when it comes to air pollution. The aforementioned coal is the main reason for this seasonal difference. It’s also worth noting that between the years 2000 and 2010 Beijing’s population grew 44%, from 13.5 million to 19.6 million. Now, the city’s population is estimated to be over 21 million. If that’s not a recipe for polluted air, I don’t know what is. (For context, New York City's population is 18.5 million.)

The U.S. Embassy (along with other entities) monitors the air and puts out hourly readings of the density of PM 2.5 in the air, so we can get real time air quality updates. What’s PM 2.5? It’s the particulate in the air that’s small enough to get deep into your lungs, and into your bloodstream. It’s bad news, and can lead to all kinds of health problems. On a really bad days here, the air has a PM2.5 concentration of over 500 per cubic meter. For scale, the EPA says that the maximum exposure to PM2.5 in a single day shouldn’t be higher than 35. Lately, anything under 100 is a good day here. Beijing today is kind of like Los Angeles in the 1940s/50s.

If you think this all sounds terrible, it’s not actually, for us. We have high performing air filters in our apartment, which means we can hide in comfort, and I have no real reason to complain. When we go out, we wear face masks that filter out the bad stuff, which is handy. One (two) downsides of wearing masks is that they fill with condensation and also make my voice pretty much inaudible. I have to pull off the mask to talk to anyone, which can make it an imperfect safety measure. Some unexpected perks of wearing a mask: it covers my face, so I don’t have to worry about making the right facial expression for whatever situation I’m in. More importantly, I can talk out loud to myself and NOBODY CAN HEAR ME. How great is that? I’ll tell you: really freaking great.

Pretty view from a clear day on the Great Wall...just to break up this smog talk.

One of my friends likes to point out that masks don’t filter out smells. Beijing, like most big cities, is already a sensory rollercoaster without the air issue—think disconcerting scent combos like sewage alongside roasting meat. Or, my favorite, the days when it smells like the neighborhood farted. When the air is bad, though, the great outdoors has a distinctive scent on top of all the regular smells—a weird, metallic, burning smell.

The upshot: temporarily losing something keeps me from taking it for granted, and from here on out I will forever appreciate clean air. For now, we plan things by air—if we have indoor stuff scheduled for a day that breaks clear, we might bump said stuff to another day and go outside instead. On the other hand, if we’re planning to hit the dance floor on New Year’s Eve (for example) we’ll shelve that idea if the AQI signals DOOM.

Giant lamb and carrot dumplings with spicy pickled vegetables and beer. The bomb.

On Tuesday, when the air was clear after days of blah, my friend and I went to a new restaurant for lunch and had our minds blown by killer dumplings at killer prices (too much lunch for two people came in around $10.50).

The tail end of a lamb and carrot dumpling. The brown sauce is vinegar mixed with hot pepper oil

Today we went for another (semi) clear day lunch at a restaurant serving food from Xinjiang Province (halal food). Also super good. Would I have planned those lunches if every day was a clear day? Maybe, but it wouldn’t have been as good.

Lunch at the Xinjiang restaurant. Top left: roast lamb with naan-like bread. Top right: sauteed spinach with peanuts. Bottom right: dry fried green beans. Bottom left: tea.

Homemade yogurt at the Xinjiang restaurant. The cumin dent on the top left is from dipping pieces of lamb into the yogurt. Really good, guys.

In other news, we’re leaving for Hawaii in a few days for a belated honeymoon and WE ARE JAZZED. Who knows, I might even blog about it.

That’s all for now, but before I go here are some safety tips for riding a cable car: