Beijing's parks

You now how it is that when you are intentionally looking for something, you suddenly realise how much of that thing there is? For example when you only know a few chinese characters, you suddenly see them everywhere (like 'bei' and 'jing'!), or in a similar case, once you buy a certain brand of car, you suddenly recognise how many other people own the same one!

Well, in my case, I have started to realise just how green Beijing is, and that, actually, Beijing's city planners are very clever (and also very dumb actually, depending on the example you choose to use!). In particular, the 'green' in Beijing city. This sounds bizarre.

First when you arrive in Beijing you go see some of the tourist sites, and some of these are in big parks, or near parks (or lakes with grass around them!) -Summer palace, yuanmingyuan, zhongshan, beihai, Temple of heaven etc etc. Then you start to live here and you only see the CBD (if you work), Haidian/Wudaokou (if you study) and the ringroads/subway that transport you between them, your house and sanlitun (or similar)..where is all the green?

Well if you look closely, you realise that when Beijing built their 5 or so ring roads, they made sure that between the two flows of traffice there is a green hedge, and between the traffic and the cycle/bus lane there is often hedges too. (thats a lot of hedges, since there are a lot of ring roads!). You then realise that along all the canals (also about 3 or 4 rind-canals, plus lots of 'joining canals') that are being redone, there are lots of grassy areas (long and thin). then you look closer, outside of the 2nd ring road, on all the other main roads and see little areas of grass (or the playground equipment) for people to sit and enjoy.

There are also specific small parks built. There were 2 around the corner from the old office, that are landscaped and everything (tiny things 5 minutes to walk all around each one easily, but accommdoating 50+ people on a quiet day). There are also massive parks, like Haidian Park; newly built and newly visited by me :). Its fantastic; one of the resutls of the environmental laws that apply for new developments. As in (says Bruce, who i mentioned before is an expert and did a presentation on this recently) the fact that for every new appartment complex built, a certain amount must be kept for green, communal areas, or for whole new complexes, a whole new park must be made (the case with haidian's IT district).

When they do this, they do it so well! Haidian park has rock features, fountains, speakers (with tasteful chinese music suprisingly), lakes, hills, bridges, benches, flat areas for kite-flying etc etc -even an open air concert hall! Even the small ones that are dotted around on the sides of the road are meticulously watered, planned and so on.

Unfortunately even in the (biggish) haidian park you can only just escape the noise of traffic (its near a ring road, in fact everything is near a ring road!), but they are wonderful places to go when you can see some sky! Although the parks around the forbidden city are historical (temples, old parks...) they are still cheap-ish entrance fee (and they are so well looked after its worth it), and i would go to those more often if they weren't so inconvenient!

I won't say Beijing beats Central London for its parks (with the ultimate combination of massive ones and small private, hidden ones), but its getting there! Roll on the olympics, more environmental pressuregroups and maybe more days where the sky can be seen!