What Year Is It?

There is one question that I simply do not have a simple answer for. I have actually found that when I'm asked this question I just seem to open my mouth and nothing comes out. So now I will try to answer it. Oh yeah. The question is

"So, What it like in Beijing?"

Well if you have some time I'll try to tell you.

My grandmother was born in 1900 and passed away in 1986. She had quite a large family and lived a full life. As I've read, and heard stories about her, I have realized that she was alive during a time when change was the norm in the U.S.A.. If you think about it, when she was born, the automobile was just invented, indoor plumbing was a luxury, the electric washing machine was not invented yet , the telephone was only 23 years old and was not an everyday household item, and most people had not heard of the word "movie." When she past away, phones were everywhere, airplanes were common, horse and buggies were a thing of the past, a washing machine was found in almost every home, and Imax movies were becoming the big thing to see.
Since her death the cell phone has become common and normal, "land lines" are becoming a thing of the past, the PC has gone from a very large piece of equipment that was great for doing term papers to this thing that weighs maybe 3lbs that you can "surf the net" with. Actually the lap top is even becoming obsolete. With the 3g and 4g phones out there. you can call your friend, listen to whatever music you want and surf the net. It's just amazing!

All this and much more has happened in just 110 years.

Now how about we take all of the last 110 years and squeeze them into about ten years.

In my last blog I mentioned about all the first time drivers in China. Well those first time drivers are also first time cell phone users, computer users, washing machine users, indoor plumbing users, as well as anything else that was invented over the last century. Beijing, as well as China, is the land of "first-timers". The interesting thing is that with all of the modern things and ideas that are seen and heard in Beijing, the culture and people just can't seem to keep up. Here you will see places of wealth and prosperity, high rises and huge office buildings, mega malls and large supermarkets. Yet you will also see old style street vendors selling everything from fruit, to clothes, to cell phones, to meat on a stick, to pets chipmunks. You will see people dressed in nice clothes walking by vendors with horse-drawn wagons on streets filled with litter because the "street sweeper" (actual person with a pedal-powered cart and a big broom) hasn't come down that way yet to clean it up. In some cases you will see automobile stores opening up on dirt roads. You can walk down the street and see places of luxury and people hacking and spitting and even urinating.
Many of the buildings here are not always as good as they seem. In our apartment I had to go around and fix all of the drains so that sewer gas would not keep leaking into the place where we eat and sleep. These are just a few things that I have noticed. I haven't even mentioned the pollution from the cement factories and coal mines around here that cause all the pollution.
I guess that I could say that Beijing is kind of caught in this time warp thing. There are many things here that are 2010 and many things that are 1910. So Beijing is like a mixture of old, new, and the everything in between.
Well I hope that this anwsers the question to some degree of satisfaction.