Leaving the parking garage, I couldn’t help but notice the high end cars with their private parking spots. It looked like a very stylized movie set from the next sequel for The Transporter. I guess it should go without saying that Western luxuries come off like the default status symbols in Beijing, but it gets kind of annoying seeing the Western graffiti of capitalism scrawled all over a foreign country. Call me romantic and naive but I really looked forward to seeing cultural distinctions rather than cultural assimilations.
In preparing for our trip to Beijing, we heard somewhere that traffic signals or lines were more like suggestions. I don’t know about the traffic lights, but the lines definitely lack the authority they have in the states. Between the airport and the hotel, I noticed, among other things, that people drove like those erratic drivers in Chicago, well... like me in my twenties... rushing to get nowhere fast. But where my aggressive driving was colored with impatience, frustration, and some mild road rage, I noticed that when one car cuts another one off, it’s more like a chess move: impersonal, strategic, and matter of factly.
There is this weird flow to it, arterial, like blood pumping though veins, that kind of breathes in and out in a steady kind of rhythm. It can come off as disrespectful and self centered, but something about it also feels very natural... everything moving according to its nature in response to an invisible wind. Like a drunk person who doesn’t like touching people walking home in a crowd.
The abbreviated character for Beijing prefixes most of the city's vehicle license plates. I noticed on more than one occasion that when the flow of traffic was disrupted, the culprit usually had plates from outside of Beijing. Drivers who are indecisive, drive too slow, or otherwise provoke the use of horns, seem to have kindred spirits all over the world.
There are, as one might expect, a large variety of automakers I wasn’t at all familiar with. Most branding medallions were complemented by Chinese characters, including models made by automakers I was familiar with. I even saw a few trucks that looked like they popped right out of a Richard Scarry book… tiny vans on little wheels just putt-putting their way along. I saw a Nissan Altima that also had “Teana” and “VIP” letters affixed to the trunk and pillar respectively. At first I thought they were stylish personalizations, but Dea said she saw them on more than one vehicle.
Motorcyclists are daredevils out here. That, or they have incredible spider senses. They just find openings and go for it… using Jedi mind tricks, no doubt, to prevent cars and trucks from unexpectedly cutting them off.
A bit unnerved from trying to make sense of the traffic patterns, I turned my attention to the heavens. The pollution in the sky was thick, though there were spots where the sun broke through the dirty clouds like the mirth of angels. As Maatie chatted in Mandarin with the driver, who offered corrections here and there, I wondered how long it was going to take me to get some basic conversational Mandarin under my belt. Had Maatie not been engaging, it would have been a pretty quiet and long ride.
When we finally reached our destination, a Holiday Inn Express about 30 minutes out from the airport, we unloaded our bags and dragged them into the lobby of the hotel to find out about next steps.
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