BJ CITY!

It took an indignant 24 hours before I finally stepped foot in Beijing, 4AM local time. I hailed a cabbie who was pushing his car along with his hands and rode into a city who's smog became more obvious the harder the sun tried to push its way through.

On Saturday I took part in an ex-pat analogue of the Critical Mass bike movement as part of this effort to raise green awareness in a city that doesn't really give a shit about the environment. The message of our team of six riders was lost on the city's other millions of inhabitants who don't care about what some laowai have to say.
The route was from Wudaokou, which is a little north of where I'm staying, in the western part of the city, to the 798 Art District, which is on the opposite side of the city. The city's pretty enormous, so the ride ended up taking us 1.5 to 2 hours. I cruised it on some old Chinese-European crossbreed my grandfather gave me and helped me fix up.
While the official objective of Critical Mass is to raise bike awareness, the only thing it's really ever accomplished is raising the awareness of how cyclists can be huge assholes. That's lost on Beijingers, however, because everyone here is an asshole on the road. Navigating the city's streets are like playing a demented game of Frogger, where meticulous timing is necessary to avoid being swept off in a river of steel and blood. At one point a bus stopped inches from my left side when I neglected to look that way because I was too preoccupied with another car rushing towards my right. It hadn't honked or anything.
Because so many Beijingers use the bicycle as their primary means of transportation, Beijing has a solid bicycling infrastructure, with bike lanes on every main street, divided from main traffic by concrete islands. But physical barriers are little deterrents for Beijing drivers, so the bike lanes often become populated with impatient cab drivers and reckless bus drivers. Buses stop in the bike lane, and frequently you'll find yourself threading between two of these steel behemoths, like looming waves about to crash down on you from both sides.

The endpoint of the ride was at Beijing's premier art district, 798, where an electronic music festival called "INTRO" was taking place. For doing the ride, we got free admission, but of course the legion of guards plotted all over the district made things as difficult as possible for us, first denying us entry, then not letting us bring our bikes in, until the woman who organized the ride came and explained everything. Then I found out that we weren't comped on the after parties, which was part of the main draw for the whole thing. I can't believe I biked 10,000 miles for this shit.

The festival itself was alright, I'd never been to any big electronic gathering, but I saw the crowd that I had expected to see. A lot of foreigners - club kids and rave heads, fans of the "international DJ scene" according to the festival's brochure. Sprinkled among the crowds of stereotypical dance freaks were a few middle-aged Chinese mothers, there with their spawn, I assume, although I never saw them. I'd like to think that they were there for their own enjoyment.

There wasn't any booze, save for a small stand run by Absolut where they sold Chinese takeout soup containers filled with a weak vodka cranberry mix for a pricey 50 kuai each. The police had shut down the other bar in the area that was selling beer. So I finally broke and went to Absolut's tent, but found out that they had run out of ice and vodka at 4PM.

Later in the night we somehow ended up backstage, where there were many bottles of cheap Russian vodka, kegs of cheap Chinese beer, and of course, baijiu ("white liquor"), which is basically Chinese rubbing alcohol. I spoke with a man who had just eaten a bag of mushrooms, which he got as payment for doing a photo shoot - the last thing I had expected to hear in China (drugs are extremely illegal and hard to find here). We also ran into this old Chinese punk that I moshed with at a show the night before - apparently it was his party we were crashing, but he didn't seem to mind. With his blessing, we stole some grilled kebabs and drank our fill of liquor, and wandered off into the rest of the evening.