Sunday I took a long run downtown as part of my marathon training, although I really wonder if they're going to be able to have that race. I noticed that all the drugstores we went by had some kind of barrier in front to keep customers out, with staff taking their orders from outside the store. Probably a great way to keep SARS from spreading, given that sick people certainly will head to the drugstore. When we went biking in the afternoon, I noticed that this was no longer the case. A Chinese friend I asked about this guessed that the city may have ordered them to open. Many, many restaurants and businesses are closed, which gives the city a very bleak appearance. Beijing Normal now has security guards positioned so that they can stop people when they *leave* campus, which is a disturbing thought, although I'm not sure who they're stopping. I've only been asked to show my ID once, but they are stopping all the students and anyone else trying to get into campus.  

Monday, after my wife's classes were done, we biked downtown so that she could get some clothes and gifts. Again, many stores are closed. It's difficult to find photographs that really show the change, because even when it's "empty" many parts of Beijing are no less crowded than a typical American town. Here's a picture of a bus on a main road around noon on Monday, which would otherwise be packed.

NOTE: If the pictures don't show up, it's because of problems communicating with the Radio server -- please check back later...

Here's a picture of one very busy place, the old Beijing train station

And here's a picture of the "Silk Market", looking south from the alley by the embassies (the banner just says that smoking is strictly forbidden):

The Silk Market in particular had a glum, lackadaisical mood about it, although once I got involved with bargaining for the things my wife wanted, it was kind of nice to get back into the rhythm of arguing in a foreign language. Everyone's face was preserved, we got reasonable but not unreasonable bargains, and my wife didn't have to leave me because I'm so hard-hearted, as one of the shopkeepers suggested before we reached an agreement and became friends again.

Downtown along the main road toward the Silk Market (Jianguomen) there were police standing every few hundred yards blocking off one of the lanes, presumably for leaders or foreign visitors' travel. That used to happen fairly often near Beijing Normal before they built the freeway to the airport, but I didn't realize it was still going on. It certainly uses a lot of manpower. We also had three ambulances pass us with sirens on during the course of our trip. I was struck by the number of people each carried, all bundled up in their protective outfits. It looked to be about 6 or 7 people per ambulance, which seems a lot to be exposing to potential danger.

When I got home I found out that the Great Wall Marathon is indeed not going to be held in May. I'm not at all surprised, since I doubt that people in that area would welcome a big influx of runners from or coming through Beijing. Particularly after I read an article in the Washington Post about how people in the suburbs are putting barricades on roads to keep Beijingers away. It's too bad -- I'd gotten to be in pretty good shape, and with the disease scare I might have been able to win my age group, if no one else showed up. They're planning to hold it on November 1, by which point the disease and attendant panic may be just a sad memory.

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11:40:05 PM  #  

Saturday night we biked downtown and watched what may be our last movie in China, "The other side of the bridge", a very fine movie about an Austrian woman who moved to China in the 1930s to get married and spent the rest of her life in Anhui Province. It was shown by "Cherry Lane Movies", a non-profit group that takes good Chinese movies, quickly writes English subtitles, and presents them on the weekend. It is put on in a big building that is used during the week as a movie set and to explain Peking opera to tourists, so it's a nice, well-ventilated place. Nonetheless, the government here plans to close all theaters for the duration, so that may be a SARS casualty.

On the way we stopped at the big Lufthansa shopping center so my wife could look for gifts. Everything in the large deserted stores were extremely expensive, but in the supermarket in the basement I was able to buy a bunch of dried beans to add to our own emergency stocks.

One sign of ordinary life persisting came when I went to retrieve my bicycle outside. I noticed that my big red cable lock wasn't on the bike, and noticed that there was one just like it in the basket of the bike beside mine. I thought I must have failed to close it, and someone had retrieved it and tossed into a bike's basket. But I couldn't open it with my key, and finally realized that it had been jimmied open and ruined. The second lock on my bike (a Taiwanese U-lock) had also been tampered with, although the tool used to open it had broken, leaving the head in the lock. Luckily I had my computer geek Swiss army knife with me, complete with pliers, and was able to get the tool out and unlock my bicycle.

Surprisingly, the lock that I had the most confidence in is the one that was removed, and the one that I had little confidence in (I had accidentally discovered a very easy way of disassembling it) was the one that saved the day. I have what I think is a better lock now, but I'm starting to understand why people here use multiple locks. Many bikes, including mine, have an internal lock that consists of a screw in the front column that serves to lock the front wheel at an angle, like the steering locks on cars, so that you could only bike around in a circle if it's engaged. The bicycle thief had opened the cover of that lock to make sure it wasn't engaged; I guess I need to start doing that in the future.

My wife had said that one of her teachers had said that many people were buying bicycles now out of fear of cabs and public transportation, so I guess there's a strong market for "used" bikes as well.

The city is now plastered with the SARS poster below, which is interesting because it combines information that would be standard public health information in the US with information that we would view as technical advice for physicians. I'm going to post and translate one section a day until I finish. There are medical terms I'm not familiar with, so I won't vouch for the translations, but I would welcome corrections and I'll update it as I receive them.

http://radio.weblogs.com/0100066/images/SARSposter.jpg

 

Here's a detailed picture of the top left panel:

http://radio.weblogs.com/0100066/images/SARSadvice1.jpg

The first point is: "Early discovery" [Note: I can't vouch for my translation, but if anyone sends me corrections, I'll update it and acknowledge them]-- it describes the symptoms of SARS -- 1. Close contact within two weeks with someone with SARS. 2.A fever over 38 degrees Celsius, a cough,  fast breathing, gasping for breath or difficulty breathing, a sound like "luo" when you breathe (?), or change in state of your lungs. 3. In the early stage, the white blood count is normal or reduced. 4. Chest X-rays show a flake-shaped area, which gradually shows  a shadow or shows a net-like appearance. 5. Antibacterial treatment shows no clear improvement.

 

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9:57:37 AM  #