Changing Planes

I'm typing these words at Beijing International Airport, domestic gate 27. It's near lunch time here, four in the morning in my head. Not too badly zonked yet by sleep deprivation: the sunshine is bright and I accidentally bought a soda can of sweetened ice coffee with milk, branded Pokka. Couldn't read anything on the can, wanted to try some local stuff. The can was massive, almost twice the metal weight of a Western one.

Beijing smells of coal smoke and is wrapped in a faint ochre haze. Approaching for landing, we flew over something that looked a lot like a nuclear power plant with the characteristic truncated-cone cooling towers, surrounded by industrial sprawl and endless tenement housing blocks. And yet, as always in this country, there's small-scale agriculture on every spare scrap of land all the way up to the airport fence. The barbed wire festoons along its top are most likely there to keep guerilla subsistence farmers from planting qing cai along the runways. Urban zoning seems absent or at least negotiable.

My El Cheapo cell phone operator (dJuice) doesn't seem to have a roaming agreement with the locals, and not only is the wifi here blocked by a pay screen -- it's entirely in Chinese. So I can't get this on-line right away. Signing off at Wednesday lunch, 11:35 (GMT+8).