Size Matters

Forty-eight hours in China, and I've learned one thing for sure: China likes to build things, and to build them big. The new Beijing Aiport Terminal 3 dwarfs you with a half-mile long wing-shaped terminal, with an up-swept metal roof supported by insistent columns overhead and a seemingly endless stretch of moving walkways to take you to the immigration check.

After traversing the airport, express train to the city (and getting past the airport train station, which was an unfortunate greenhouse of a place at 32C, though the air conditioned benches helped a little), and shiny new subway, we arrived at our hotel. Grand when it was built, with marble floors, monogrammed towels, and the AC set to frigid, the Harmony Hotel still feels slightly threadbare and forgotten on a side alley near the Beijing Railway Station. Still, it's been a chilly and welcoming spot to call home for the past two days.

Yesterday was a morning trip to the Great Wall -- a section two hours outside of town that was mercifully minimalist in its hawkers and souvenir shops. The climb up to the wall was steep, and at 9 am it was already pushing 90F. I was soaked through within minutes. The climb up was well worth it, though, with each gatehouse on the wall a charming variation on the one before. Between the humidity and smog, the snaking views will never reproduce in photos, but peering into the mist to make out the tan line of wall creeping across the wooded hills had a romanticism to it.

And why the title, you ask? Not really
for the Airport, or for the Great Wall, but for the roadways. Driving out to the Wall, we left the heart of the city behyind for a strange no-man's land, the Brentwood of Beijing. A mix of corn plantations, fields with drying bricks, the odd strip of rund down single story apartments mixed with an auto repair shop. Road repair crews had a paving machine or two, along with a handful of men and women weilding twig brooms to clear the area of pebbles before the pavers came through. And, of course, you-pick-it resorts, though in China you can go you-catch-it fishing in concrete pools as well as plucking peaches from the trees. Through this uncomfortable mixed-use landscape, massive clusters of tracked homes are sprouting up, with no apparent rhyme or reason. These are not your Central Valley single families, though. Styted to look like the stucco homes you can find from Brentwood to Windhoek, these are actually 6 story mega-homes, with room for ten or twenty apartments each. Clearly in 5 years the area will be home to tens of thousands of new families, and they're building the roads for that influx now. On the way to the Wall, we passed a pristine expanse of black asphalt off to the left, stretching into the fields and shrubby trees as far as the smog would let us see. With room for eight or ten lanes, it looked more runway than roadway. On the return journey, they'd already begun painting in lane lines and turn arrows. When you know millions of people are on their way in, I guess it's best to set enough spots at the table for them at the outset.