When in China...

That was a little heavy to start things off with, and it won't always be that way. In order to move on, I need to take care of some unfinished business. Herewith, things one should know when travelling in China, with specifics concerning Beijing:

1. Maintain a collection of napkins, serviettes, wetnaps, tissues, or toilet paper on your person at all times. Public toilets are abundant, but they seem to run out of these items fairly often. To that end, you may also find it necessary to maintain a small bottle of soap or hand sanitizer available as well.


2. Hats, sunscreens, and parasols are mandatory, especially if you're a redhead.
   It appears to require a particular dermal fortitude to withstand the solar onslaught in China. The sun seems to take it as a personal challenge to deliver the same amount of UV power per capita in China as it would deliver to any other country in the world. People who fancy themselves as the tanning type will find themselves burning. Those who burn will burn nearly instantaneously. Even some who have grown up in China find that after returning from extended trips abroad their dermal armour is not what it once was. Perhaps it thinks that it can finally relax after those endless years of vigilance.


3. Forget all of your preconceived Western, bourgeois notions concerning personal space.
   Only the rich can afford to have personal space. Everyone else shares the People's Body Odour, and inhales the People's Morning Breath every day on every underground, every bus, and every lift in China. This is especially true in large cities.


4. Green does not mean go; red does not mean stop.
   Chinese vehicles and pedestrians follow a very strict set of rules when in traffic. However, these rules aren't written down in any Highway Traffic Act that I'm aware of. For example, traffic lights do not dictate the movement of vehicles, but rather suggest at possible trends in local avenues of transport. You may find yourself caught by conflicting green lights, and aggressively barging your way into and out of traffic will become a necessity. Playing chicken as a pedestrian in a road full of zippy cars, lumbering buses, weaving bicycles, and other chimeric variations on wheeled vehicles will soon become your predominant pasttime.


5. Always keep an eye on where you're going.
   Better yet, watch your feet as you walk to avoid such punishments for absent-minded pedestrians as construction, holes in the ground, crouching children, sleeping hobos, small women, animal feces, and gobs of poisonous tar disguised as spit. Picking a careful footpath is essential to the health and safety of your feet, which will be critical to your ability to continue living and travelling in China; destinations and edifices are rarely accessible. Those that are, are purely so by accident.


6. Everything is small in China, built on an industrial scale.
   Here you will find the shockingly incongruent warehouses filled with small 10 square foot stalls selling all manner of clothing, toy, trinket, and thingummadooer, and the eyebrow twitch inducing juxtaposition of former Cultural Revolution-era factory complexes occupied by innumerable artists' galleries, collectives, cafes, and studios. Beehives have nothing on Chinese infrastructure.


7. China smells. Always.
   When you arrive in China, your senses will not be merely assaulted by the new experience that is China, but assaulted then battered. Your sense of smell is not exempt from this brutality. The following smells will be your dominant nasal experience in the following order: internal combustion engine exhaust (complete and incomplete), tobacco smoke, refuse (food, animal, and human), body odour. (See items 1, 3, and 5.)


8. If you have a puffer, keep it on you at all times. If you don't, consider getting one.
   Although the air quality in many cities has improved from what it once was due to such incentives as the 2008 Olympics and encroaching deserts, depending on the time of year and the location it can still be fairly poor. Fewer people walk or bike around the city with pollution masks on now, but there are still some and for good reason: you won't want to see what colour your snot is here.


9. Don't travel alone.
   Nearly everyone will at some point become disoriented, lost, lonely, and overwhelmed by the strange perpendicular way in which China is foreign to our sensibilities. It is much easier to deal with all of this with another sentient being sharing your travels and travails; it doesn't even matter if they speak the same language, simply the shared understanding helps.


10. Anything someone may have told you about life and travel in China older than a few months is likely out of date already.
    This entry is included in the previous statement.