Like a Standing Circle

South bound.  Crossed Jianguomen, on the fourth ring.  It’s only 4:00PM but it’s completely jammed.  I’m spinning around with all the different projects I’m working on.  Hazzy and hot but it isn’t as hot as it has been.  One can already feel the fall at the door here in the middle of August.  Autumn is always the finest time in Beijing.   

A bit lighter.  The Bozo the Clown, waxing-Mao-wings I had growing on my right and left profile have been shorn.   You know its bad when you're kids tell you, you look like Mao.  Soon I will have many guests in succession.  I will need to make sense of China to each of them.  I’m considering the ties from this professional exercise to what I do with students.  May of the epiphanies are simply reused, over and over.  Continued learning about this place requires proper focus. Like so many of us, I have wasted too much time recently watching the bumper car ride of the our horrible president instead. 

I looked out the cab and noticed we’re near the Temple of Heaven.  Iconic, I’d almost certainly not take people to visit that construction unless they had a week’s time in the capital.  Built without any nails, it would be more remarkable in almost any other city.  In Beijing it is overshadowed, I suspect by so many other historical claimants.  

This area is being rebuilt.  It’s already over built.  To the right a few blocks of 80’s era buildings that have been reduce to a few needle structures.  I’m heading form this neighborhood up on to the third ring road.  You notice all the old dead spaces of Beijing that will be replace by modern dead spaces.  It’s grey outside.  Pollution is part of the issue .  Precipitation and humidity the other portion.

Off here on Guanghua Lu there are a rash of new towers going up.  They look like a standing circle of redwoods.  They’re all in various stages of development.  I think I used to work in a office that was down on that road, where one of those buildings has sunk its roots.  The tallest one of all will be Beijing’s tallest construction.  It’s tall.  The top of the building flairs out nicely and forms a bulb-like crown.  I like it so much more than that Freedom Tower eye-sore in my home town. 

Friday, 8/11/17