Right now I’m sitting with this insanely hot Equadorian chick in Lush, a pub/café in the trendy college neighborhood of Wudaoku. This joint could be in Cambridge, for all of the dark wood tables, scuffed floor, low ceiling and cramped raised stage in the corner. They offer movie nights on Mondays, trivia on Wednesdays, an open mic night on Sundays and live music scattered throughout the week. There are a thousand of these places scattered around the colleges back home. But the one thing that this place has that all of those don’t is smoke.

Smoking bans are popping up all across the world. Boston introduced theirs a half decade ago and after a recent study showed that it has directly led to a decline in deaths from heart attacks, it was recently strengthened.  But here in China, you can light up almost anywhere.

[Right now, the hot Latin girl is putting her tongue in my ear. It's hard to focus, but I shall soldier on.]

Sure, the subways are smoke-free, as are all Starbucks, but almost all restaurants and bars either allow smoking or only have small No Smoking sections. The sidewalks are filled with smokers. Some estimates say that almost 400 million Chinese smoke; a number so high that even the government here was unable to institute their own ban in bars and restaurants earlier this year. For somebody like me who absolutely hates smoking and is mildly disgusted at the very scent of a puffer nearby, it is like Hell on Earth. The only thing that makes it tolerable is drinking heavily.

Good thing that booze is cheap here.

An interesting short piece about Beijing’s air quality appeared on Boston.com this Sunday. Instead of just saying that the air in China sucks, the writer makes a very accurate point:

Since China’s capital slipped out of the world spotlight — and away from its Herculean efforts to unclutter the air for the Games by closing factories, halting construction, and removing half of the cars from the roads — the air quality has bounced between looking a bit better or far worse than what you’d suck up in Los Angeles.

A fair assessment. I have most certainly noticed some amazingly clear days as well as some smoggy ones. The reason for the improvement from the past (as inconsisent as it is)? Many of the worst-offending factories and foundries that were shut down in the run-up to the Olympics were permanently moved out of the city. Also, thousands of old, inneficent, exhaust-belching trucks that were used on construction sites and to haul all sorts of good to and fro were permanently retired.

I haven’t really noticed any adverse effects from the air quality here yet, but, to be fair, I haven’t been out to play a hard-core game of frisbee since I arrived. I do, however, walk at least 1 hour per day and I do not feel winded. I may feel differently come spring time when I play frisbee again and start taking kung-fu lessons. We’ll see.

Anway, you can check out the rest of the article here.

This is a story of how the internet brought a bunch of strangers from all corners of the globe together during the Olympics and how I got to see a part of China that the government here isn’t showcasing to the world. (NOTE: Click on any of the pictures below to jump to my complete photo album from the day with lots of captions and additional details.)

Somebody told me about a guy named Frank who had posted on a social media site that he had 6 tickets to see soccer in Tianjin (about 110km from Beijing). I was keen to check it out so my guest Jocelyn gave him a call to see if we could buy 2 of them. Unfortunately, we had just been beaten to the punch by another guy named Jonas. Frank said that Jonas might not need all 6 of the tickets that he had bought from him and that we should contact him to see if we could snag a pair… I got him on the phone just in the nick of time and reserved our seats.

This was great all by itself, but Jonas went a step further. He and another one of the people attending the game had hired a van to drive everybody to the game so that we would not have to deal with the train and the crowds on the way back. Figuring in the cost of tickets and an even split of the driver’s fee, the final price for a seat at the soccer match came out to 420 RMB ($61 USD). Not a bad deal.

All of this was arranged via a website posting, a couple of text messages, 1 phone call and, eventually, a meeting the night before the game to pick up the tickets. This simply would not have been possible just 8 years ago and it’s pretty amazing when you think about it that way. I love the Internet.

So on Wednesday my guest Jocelyn & I showed up at the 7-11 across the rotary from Dongzhimen Station to meet up with our motley crew of international football hooligans and our driver. I must be honest when I say that when I saw our vehicle I was less than impressed:

Our chariot awaits...

The driver was a great guy, but he had no idea how to get to the stadium once we reached Tianjin. This caused some significant delays in getting there, but I actually didn’t mind too much (even though I was uncomfortably squeezed into a mini-van from hell) because it gave me time to properly meet this great group of people that had all stumbled into our excursion randomly: Jonas from Germany, Elisa from Italy, and Alexis & Pierre from France. When you factor in myself and Jocelyn -who is from Singapore- you had 6 people representing 5 countries. Wow! By the time that we arrived at the arena and I got over my now customary initial giddiness, we milled about for a few minutes taking in the scene as friends.

Access granted!

Here's the whole crew getting ready to head into the stadium, (l-to-r): Jonas (Germany), Alexis (France), Me (US of A, baby!), Elisa (Italy), Pierre (France) & Jocelyn (Singapore). 6 people, 5 countries. If that's not what the Olympics is about, then I don't know what is.

Now this is the showcase that China is putting on for the world! All of the roads leading to the part of town that the building is in are so new that they’re almost shiny. The area around it is spotless. As for the building itself, it is world-class and breathtakingly gorgeous. It really evokes a sense of awe as your walk into it- which is just what the Chinese want.

Don't tell me that this staium doesn't look like a spacecraft that has landed and the people filing in are the newly-conquered masses going to pay homage to their new alien overlords.

Then, it hits you over the head when you enter as it’s support structure spreads out around you like a web. The sightlines in the stands were great and the seats were spacious. All-in-all it was an awesome place to catch a game in.

Again, I need to come clean: I don’t like soccer. In fact, I pretty much hate it. A friend of mine once called it “90 minutes of turnovers and 2 seconds of scoring.” That’s a fair assessment, I think. The first game didn’t do anything to alter this opinion (my new friends -soccer fans all- agreed that it was just about the worst game that they had ever seen live), but the second game was enjoyable enough.

Of course, the main attraction for everything so far for me has been the crowds, and here it was no different.

One of the things that I have learned since I got here is that the Chinese are not very experienced at cheering loudly at sporting events. Chants of anything other than “Lets Go China!” and individual screaming at players/teams is just not common. So when I started screaming for Italy during game 1 (in deference to my new friend Elisa) and for Australia in game 2 (I just wanted to be in on the “Oi, Oi, Oi!” chants) the Chinese fans in earshot would all turn to gawk at me and/or take pictures. I’m sure that this is partially because I have an unusually loud voice from working as a vendor at Fenway Park for 9 seasons, but it was also clear that my exhortations were way out of the norm for them. Eventually, a group of Chinese asked me to sit amongst them so that I could lead them in some cheers. They were an absolute blast and they even bought me some water.

After everything was over our group marched out of the stadium, past the ominous phalanx of security guards and back into our chariot. The ride home was another adventure altogether.

Not only did our driver not know the way to the arena once he got to Tianjin, but he failed to keep track of how he eventually got there because we got completely lost when we stated back towards Beijing. And to make matters worse, we got lost smack in the middle of the industrial zone.

As I’ve mentioned before, Beijing has cleaned itself up considerably for these games. But when we got lost, we were driving through some of the worst industrial zones in the country. Even though the factories have all been shut down in order to clear the air for Beijing, the environment surrounding these facilities is not anywhere near any Olympic venues and nobody attending the games will ever see them (unless they are hopelessly lost like us). As a result, they have not been cleaned up at all.

We knew that we were outside the “Cleanup Zone” when the air changed. It became fetid (which was partly due to the oppressive humidity that had been hanging around the cities for a week) and the smell acrid. When we pulled over s the driver could ask for directions, none of us wanted to even get out of the car to stretch our legs while we were in this area, lest we walk in something or trip and get whatever might be coating the dirt on our skin.

It was palpably toxic.

Something that is pretty clear once you get here is China’s desperate need to modernize and grow it’s cities. In the past 20 years the Chinese have moved 350 million people out of abject 3^rd World poverty and into a middle class that has a standard of living on par with the United States. You can’t really argue that this is a good thing on a strictly humanitarian level, and it benefits the entire world. (What do you think is keeping the flailing US mortgage markets afloat right now and is funding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but Chinese investment in our debt?) The movement of China’s population from the countryside into the cities has been the engine that has driven this growth and it has resulted in 37 cities with at least 1.5 million people and 10 with more than 10 million. (New York City “only” has 8 million people in it.) This is the largest migration of human beings in the history of our species, and it has all happened in the last single generation.

The up-sides associated with larger cities (more productivity, more cultural development and a quicker, more nimble creative economy) point to an even brighter future, because for every person who had been lifted up within the last generation, there are 4 more who are still living in shacks, remote villages and are subsisting on pennies a day in conditions that have not improved in 50 years. If you like what China’s 350 million-strong Middle Class has done for the world so far, get ready for the other 1 billion that are right behind them!

All of this has obvious prices, and our little troupe was meandering through one of them. You can practically hear the earth groaning under the weight of so many people in these mega-cities, and the supporting infrastructure and raw materials needed to sustain them are, quite simply, devastating the environment. The country can not go on this way much longer.

The only silver lining that we could come up with in the van was that China is determined to continue growing and they are acutely aware of the environmental issues associated with that. They want to find ways to support themselves without harming the environment for their own good, but also to just show the world that they can.

Too bad the US isn’t interested in doing something like that.

After 5 straight days of running around town, attending games and some incredibly late nights, I decided to take it easy this Friday and watch some events on TV. (Watched a kick-ass table tennis semi-final between Singapore and Korea; saw Michael Phelps win again; saw Russian women’s basketball win an unexpectedly close game against Brazil, and sat through a thrilling USA/China women’s volleyball match while getting a foot massage with my friend Alex.) I’ve also been catching up on my blogging. Ironically, today was the first sunny day since I arrived last week and I spent it indoors. In case you were wondering, the sky was quite blue.

Stay tuned for some posts to appear here very shortly.

My CouchSurfing guest Jocelyn said it best, I guess. There has been lots of hay made over the pollution here in China and the government’s efforts to clean up the city/region enough for the games to go on without health issues arising for the athletes. Not only are the Chinese keen on impressing the Olympians, but they are desperate to showcase their ability to clean up their act when needed and to be an impressive host for the almost 1 million people who will rotate through here during the games.

I think that what they are doing is definitely working. It has been cloudy both days that I have been here so far so I cant tell you if the sky has been blue, but the air is most definitely cleaner than it has been during my previous visits (twice 9 years ago and twice more in the last 6 months). You really can smell the trees!

What has been most striking to me is the utter lack of traffic. I mean, this is one of the most congested cities in the world, with 3.3 million cars on the road. But so far I haven’t seen one single traffic jam. Most of this is due to the government’s restrictions on cars on the road (only cars with license plates ending in even or odd numbers can be on the road on alternating days and all trucks have been banned). Part of it is the simple fact that the Chinese don’t seem to want to create huge backups around venues.

Construction has been shut down and most factories in the region have been closed. You can really tell the difference in the level of dust in the air without cranes and construction vehicles running non-stop all around. Instead of a bleak, smothering air mass, the city feels a lot like L.A., and that’s a huge step up from where they were before. Color me impressed… So far.

Because I’ve seen Chinese efficiency at work before, I never really doubted their ability to get this cleanup done. To understand just how important it is for these people to “get big face” in front of their visitors, keep in mind an old Chinese saying, which goes something like “A Chinese person would rather starve than have a guest in their home leave hungry.”

The cleaning measures are supposed to say in place through the Para-Olympic games in September. I’ll let you know if they hold true.

In the meantime, I’m off to try to get tickets to see boxing this afternoon or evening. I also have a line on some baseball tickets for Thursday night (Taiwan vs. Japan). Stay tuned!!