In China, people are dancing in the streets. In parks, in squares, in the parking lots of grocery stores. We bumped into them in Beijing and in all the cities we passed through.
They go out with a big speaker that runs on batteries and they do choreography on traditional music, pop, something that everyone would like.
Sometimes conflicts come up between rival clans of dancers, they fight, they compete with the young skaters for the public spaces, the Party wants to set them in order, but no one has the illusion that they can be stopped. There are over 100 million of practitioners, according to the official estimations.
Dancing in public places has been historically attested for thousands of years, even since the time of Emperor Yao. The revival that’s happening now comes on a wave of nostalgia for the age of Mao. Most of the female dancers were young in the time of the Cultural Revolution, when dances were part of the propaganda apparatus.
But I also saw a lot of young girls, boys, children, it’s super catchy!
I danced a little myself, I can’t lie to you 😛

On a street in Shunping, Hebei province, 8 cages with songbirds hang in a tree. On top of one of the cages there’s a tape recorder. It plays recordings of birds singing.

As I take a photo of it, a man comes out of a shop, sees me, goes back inside, returns with another man who flashes his smartphone. They take a picture of me.

We’re all rare animals somewhere.

There are nine million bicycles in Beijing ♫ only if you count all the trike cars, electric scooters, the tricycles that carry, like ants, mountains of stuff, cars as wide as bicycles that transport an entire family, the travelling food stalls that fry shrimps on the go… all these vehicles are like bicycles and take up much less space than it would have been possible if each person had driven a large car. About half of the city traffic happens on the bicycle lane.

Therefore, each street has bike lanes, usually 10 meters wide, and sometimes wider than car lanes. Car drivers behave like sheriffs, do not give right of way, and honk all the time… but there’s a lot of space and the logic behind traffic is fairly easy to learn, so we now roll somewhat safely.

We struggled for four days to find trekking bikes. You can easily find city bikes or mountain bikes; long-distance biking is not quite popular. We checked out about 20 stores and markets and found some gems at only half the price you’d usually pay in Romania, but none were what we needed. Eventually, we managed to find two previously used and seriously muddied bikes in a store for foreigners. They were considerably more expensive than what we’d seen, although slightly cheaper than those in Romania. It took us another day to equip them for the road ahead…

And so we began our journey…

Yes, so far we wrote about dancing and how open people in China are and how easy it is to communicate. But there is also this: The pernicious pollution. Yesterday we passed through a region, on the way from Shunping to Quyang, about 250 km south of Beijing, you can not exaggerate how dirty it was.

Your eyes burn, the heart races, the nose runs, you feel like you want to spit out every minute. And it’s not just us who feel this way. There is no getting used to this.

On the street you see people wearing surgeon masks or Robocoplike protection shields on their heads, even inside cars or buses. The faces of old people are lined with trenches from decade long squirming, kids use thumb and index finger to block their nostrils from the reek, the fumes of cars, charcoal, factories, manure, burning waste and tires and open fireplaces and fertilizers and chemicals.

Comrade Mao and his friends: Buddha, Confucius, Lao Tzu…

I met them near Lingshou, in front of one of the hundreds of tiny factories that have been terrorizing our lungs these recent days.

The boss there was very proud of their legacy. He pulled us inside the courtyard and gave us a tour of China’s history in cement.

One thing I didn’t understand though was why did Mao have such short legs, since everybody knows that Pops only spoke the truth…