To best appreciate the awesome-but-sadly-apparently-temporary powers of China’s weather gods, you must play this mp3 while reading:

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All these photos are from out our kitchen yángtái windows. The blue sky photos are from Oct. 1st; the less-blue ones are from this morning.

When we flew in to Beijing on Sept. 30 we could barely see the terminal from the airplane on account of all the kōngqì wūrǎn (空气污染). But not to worry, in China the They can change the weather. When there’s an important made-for-TV event, They make it rain the night before and… voila!:

That was Oct 1st, the even-more-important-than-the-Olympics 60th anniversary national day military parade. And this next photo was from this morning — apparently They didn’t have any photo-ops scheduled today:

Pollution is measured here in term of “blue sky days” (蓝天). True to form, since reality in China is whatever They say reality is (you really ought to read 1984), “blue sky day” doesn’t actually mean that the sky is blue or clear; it means the official pollution readings are below a certain level, which often is still thick with haze. And never mind that the cut off line for blue sky days is still considered hazardous by the rest of the world’s pollution monitoring scales, or that They don’t even bother measuring the most harmful forms of air pollution particles. In this last photo, you can see the colour starting to change in the top left corner; there were no clouds today, and if you looked straight up, you could actually see some faint blue.

P.S. – I think I’m just about done whining about the pollution, at least for now. Posts on karaoke survival, creative ways to stay connect with family back home, Tianjin’s suspiciously curvacious public statues, free One Child Policy baby accessories, and a racial Disney moment at the English school are all in the works.

Other pollution posts:

• Everything you wish you didn’t know about air pollution in China
• This week in Tianjin (photos)
• Chewing Tianjin’s Air
• Putting the OMG! in Smog

Finally! I just discovered a great site by a family doctor in Beijing (close enough!) with all the info you need — like what to do — about the appalling infuriating horrifying confounding oppressive chewable inexcusable damnable lethal ghastly hideous depressing atrocious illiberal obscene foul nose-burning abominable face-coating heinous lì hai monstrous odious execrable unholy [they-don't-make-strong-enough-negative-descriptors] air pollution. For example:

• How Bad Is It, Really?
• Why you should Close Your Windows at Night
• About air purifiers
• Pollution slideshow
• Using the Beijing Air Quality Index (AQI) (why “200″ is 4x worse than “100″)

Call me a pampered whiny rich foreigner if you want, I don’t care; I want to liiiiiive!

And please, by all means, you’re welcome to add adjectives to my list (but keep it PG!). Sometimes it just feels good to vent to get it off your chest, especially since you can’t vent to get it out of your chest.

I’ll add a photo later if I can bring myself to take one (through tears, no doubt).

Other posts about Tianjin’s indecent pollution:

• Behold the power of China’s weather gods!
• This week in Tianjin (photos)
• Chewing Tianjin’s Air
• Putting the OMG! in Smog

What a half-hour’s bike ride during Friday morning rush hour can get you in Tianjin:

• People who stared at me: 4
• People who took no notice of me: hundreds
• Red lights: 8/11 (meaning I had to stop for 3)
• Buses I wanted to curse at: all of them, but 4 especially noxious ones in particular
• Groups of migrant construction workers protesting their late wages: 1
• Cars on fire: 1
• Buildings I should be able to see but can’t because of the air pollution: dozens? scores? hundreds?
• Years shaved off my life due to the air pollution: incalculable

Five days a week I bike half an hour one way to work; so 13.2 kilometers total there and back according to google maps. The numbers above are only for the morning commute to work. There really was a car on fire this morning.

Photos from this week. You can click some to see them bigger.

These guys are often gliding up and down the canal that runs by our apartment and the school:

Public dancing in parks is really popular, especially with the middle-aged and older crowd. These people can really dance, too:

It was polluted beyond belief this week. I took this photo on my way to school around 8am on a cloudless day:

Soon-to-be-married couples often get stylish photos taken all over town, especially in the former foreign concession areas. There were a lot of couples out the day I took this; one intersection had four different couples and camera crews. The writing is some sidewalk poetry in a former British park:

A chess game gets intense at a popular playground:

Odd contrast: a hand-pulled coal cart parked by a… I don’t know what to call a store that sells clothing/accessories like this. Many people still heat their homes with this kind of coal, and many restaurants still cook on it. That combined with all the smoking apparently makes China’s indoor air pollution up to 10 times worse than outside:

Me and Liu Wei at a rather eccentric local museum. It doubles as a restaurant and its business card says “eatable museum.” A lot of the stuff on display was damaged during the Cultural Revolution, that means there are lots of headless statues and statue-less heads. The walls are covered in shattered pottery:

I took the photo on the left today around 10:30am. The TV Tower — which you can only barely see on the left despite the fact that it’s a sunny, cloudless day — is less than two blocks away.

If you look straight up on days like these, you can see a faint hole of faded blue, but in any other direction all you get is this bright gray washed out haze that just gets thicker nearer the horizon.

Maybe I complain about the pollution too much, but it’s incredible, and we bike in it all the time. We don’t mention it much with our friends (Chinese or foreign) because there just isn’t much to say.

The second photo (above right) is from the June 2007 around 10am.

[2008 Oct 14]
These photos are from today around 9am. The first is (not) of the tower again, and the second is the opposite direction (south-east):

No clouds, no sandstorm, just wū rǎn (污染).

Air pollution of a different kind today: sand.

My teacher said this isn’t an actual sandstorm (沙尘暴 – shā chén bào); it’s just “scattering sand” (扬沙 – yáng shā). But it’s still nasty being outside in the wind.

May’s propaganda
There is no shortage of “Welcome the Olympics, be more civilized, establish a new atmosphere” banners. They’re even on taxis and buses. Neighbourhood committees are putting up posters listing the names of residents and how much they each donated to the earthquake relief effort. Roads are getting paved, unfinished buildings are getting the outsides slapped on, other buildings are getting facelifts, our fake roof is finished, you can buy 10元 (<$1.50) t-shirts on the university campuses the say "I [heart] China! Go China! Go Chinese!" and "Go China!" with politically correct maps that conspicuously include all the disputed South China Sea Islands. The “be more civilized” cartoons are posted all over, and near the school people’ve painted a giant mural of them, right next to another big slogan:

The slogan on the right says:

“Liberate thought, do work & create industry, scientific development.”
解放思想，干事创业，科学发展

Along the top of the left photo is yet another “Welcome the Olympics, be more civilized, establish a new atmosphere.”

Also, these three articles have been waiting in line since the end of February:

• Confessions Of A Propagandist
  A guy who worked two years as a “language polisher” for China’s official news agency’s English service introduces us to the world of China’s official media and the difficulties of translating official newspeak into readable English.
• “The Connection Has Been Reset”
  Explains how they control internet content and monitor user activity, how easy it is for users to get around the restrictions, and why, despite the ease with which people can get around said restrictions, the system’s quite effective anyway.
• Beijing’s Sky Blues & More ‘Blue Skies’ in Beijing
  You may have heard that Beijing has increased its air quality and met ‘blue sky’ targets ahead of the Olympics. A D.C.-based ‘independent environmental consultant,’ who was a 2006 Princeton in Asia fellow at the Natural Resources Defense Council in Beijing, explains how they manipulated their data collection procedure to report more ‘blue sky days.’ Beijing’s environmental officials respond with, “This phenomenon does not exist,” though I’m not sure if they’re referring to statistics tampering, or blue sky days.

Jessica has a hilarious post in the works about the treatment her and her workout buddy get at the gym from the middle aged ladies. Stay tuned…

In case you’re wondering, we’re back in regular classes starting Monday morning at 8am. This week new associates for the NGO arrived, so Jessica helped get their apartments ready, and on Thursday I’m doing the traffic/bike riding orientation and the trip to the bike market (for those brave enough to purchase a bike after their official introduction to Tianjin’s traffic scene!). Newly arrived folks really don’t seem to like it when we tell them you’re supposed to stay laying in the road if you get hit by a car and wait for the police. Hey, we don’t make the rules!

By the way, if you haven’t noticed yet, please check out the new-and-improved photo galleries! You can scroll through now, like a slideshow. (It “should” work on whatever browser, but if you’re having problems, try using Firefox, or just click here.)

And here’s your February dose of propaganda…

Public service commercials in any nation are perfect joke fodder, and this public service commercial from Shanghai is currently attracting scorn from the foreigner blogosphere, as can be seen in the comments on Sinosplice. It’s 6 minutes of Mainlanders not being unapologetically inconsiderate to one another in public (which we’re all in support of, by the way):

The little girl at the end says: “和谐城市心灵乐章” (hé xié chéng shì xīn líng yuè zhāng), which means something like, “Harmonious city, spiritual symphony” (?). “Harmonious” is a current official theme word/excuse/legitimizing concept for China’s ongoing social control measures.

Right at the beginning, when the foreigner couple poses for a photo, you can get a taste of the pollution haze in the background behind them.

The first days back in class after a break are always a little rough. Mr. Lù and Mr. Sòng made it a little more interesting on what they probably didn’t realize was Boxing Day by placing the still bleeding head of an as-yet-unidentified former animal on the electrical utilities box near the entrance to our complex. The rest of the just-barely-dead carcass was in a plastic shopping bag on the back of Mr. Lù‘s bike.

I thought it was a dog, but they said no, it’s an animal we don’t have in America called a pāo zi (I’m 90% certain that’s what they said). I’ve asked around, and some Chinese friends came up with páo zi (狍子), which is some kind of deer, but since when are deer carnivores? (warning: the photo‘s kind of gross). Mr. Lù bought the whole thing at the market around the corner for 50 kuài (about $6.75). He said he’s going to make stew. One person thought it might be a 黄鼠狼 (“yellow-rat-wolf” a.k.a. weasel?), but there was disagreement over whether or not you can eat those (the southerner stated matter-of-factly: “If it’s an animal, you can eat it”). Take a look at the photo and the links on the Chinese words (linked to google images) and tell us what you think it is/was.

It finally snowed this morning! We had a white Christmas, if you count a week of near-impenetrable fog. Now it’s after lunch, dry, and sunny, but the snow sucked a lot of the pollution out of the air (it made the sky a weird yellow colour for an hour or so today).

Jessica is sick, and has been for a while now. There’s this nasty bug going around that makes people cough all night for two weeks. One local said it’s just because it hasn’t snowed that everyone is getting sick (because the snow will clear the air of all the pollution). Jessica has medicine (both kinds!) and is getting better.

We just had two days off from class for of Christmas, which included a Boxing Day Christmas party with friends, and next week we get three for New Years, so we’re going to take it easy for a little while and have some fun. Maybe run around town for a bit. All these days off make coming back to class hard, because spending all this holiday time with foreigners in English takes your brain out of Chinese gear, and getting back into gear always takes a bit of effort.

In China, the weather is measured in units of “Blue Sky Days.” These undoctored photos below show why. They where taken from three places: the middle of the road where we cross to enter the school grounds, a bridge over the canal looking in the direction of our apartment, and out our kitchen window. The photos were all within 5 days of each other, except the last clear one.

Mouseover the photos for date and time.

For the record, we do occasionally have brilliantly clear blue skies, which you can see in the Tianjin Bike Ride photos.

For the Olympics they plan to rain all smog out of the air and prompt two weeks of sunshine. Hope no one gets thirsty.

In the next two shots, our apartment building is on the left but you can’t see it, way up just before the next bridge:

These last two were taken from our kitchen window:

Please pray for our lungs.

This is nuts. And I don’t mean the ladies in the photos.

The other day it rained solid all afternoon and all night. It was more rain in one day than the whole three months we’ve been here combined. We’d remarked how unusual it seemed. Then when we got to school, one of Jessica’s teachers mentioned that the government had made it rain. Other students had seen it on the news. It’s called cloud seeding. I’d heard of it before, but never actually knowingly experienced deliberate rain. Apparently they shot stuff into the clouds… apparently they do this all the time to clear the air of dust and pollution.

Aside from the regular Industrial-Revolution-era-mega-city-type pollution we’ve got going on over here, the Gobi desert can blanket Beijing in sandstorms. And we’re more or less downwind from Beijing. On a bad day, like the one we had a few weeks before the artificially enhanced rainstorm, you can clean your whole apartment at night and then write your name in the dust on the table in the morning (which is exactly what we did). As you’ve probably heard, there are plans to use cloud seeding to guarantee blue skies for the summer Olympics.

Something about messing with weather patterns gives me the willies.

Women dressed like those in the photos are common in Tianjin. It can be so dusty/polluted here that riding your bike to work can coat your face in grit. One of our teachers says she started taking the bus because she was showing up at school with dirt on her face. Most people don’t worry about it; I’ve only personally noticed this phenomenon once, on a day when we were out riding for about 6 hours. Maybe I’m just a dirty guy. But a good number of slightly older-middle-aged women (and one kid) wear nets/veils around their heads to keep the particle pollution off their skin. From far away they can look like colourful Muslims. Veils are usually accessorized with gloves, sometimes of the elbow-length variety.