This short trip to Beijing has been quite eye opening for me. I realized that there are three things that I take for granted: the quality of the air I breath, the quality of the water I drink and the quality of the food I eat. This third one is more of a life style I have inherited from my family and won’t talk about it today. The two others, I’ve never really thought about it before to be honest… there has been a few times when I was living in Paris I felt suffocated by the pollution in the air, and that the water tasted really bad. In Tokyo of course I have been worried after March 2011 with air, water and food. In early spring and in the summer I sometimes check the quality of the air for pm 2.5 but it has nothing to do with how I felt unsecured about that in China. Last year in Shanghai I was concerned by the air quality but it wasn’t as strong as it felt this time in Beijing. When seeing everywhere that you cannot drink tap water unless boiled, I realize I was living on bottled water in plastic containers, something that I avoid as much as possible to use in Tokyo… and feeling always worried about what I drink was quite strange actually for me and made me think that being able not to care about what is coming out the tap is just a precious gift. Add this to waking up in a smoggy city with air quality quite alarming made me ask myself unformulated questions about this giant gap between ultra-urban areas and rural areas. Not that rural areas are free of pollution… the river cleaning we did a few weeks ago showed me how much farmers destruct their surroundings by being careless and lazy. And I think carelessness and laziness are really two keywords for me that represent very well our societies. Being so careless that in the end you can’t breath the air around you seems unbelievable to me but that’s what it is in Chinese big cities and I do believe that it is not only China… society has decided it’s better to consume more of an electricity produced by coal rather than breathing normal air. Looking always first at serving a purpose that I cannot understand, up to a point where cities are becoming unlivable just revealed to me my misunderstanding of the world I live in, the gap between the ideals I believe in and a certain urban reality.

In the meantime, traveling is always full of surprises and even during such a short and busy visit I discovered at least two interesting things food-wise: beancurd noodles that I had in a restaurant and rose and honey milk tea that I had at a bakery where I stopped for breakfast making quite good pastries and funny artistic cakes (that I wouldn’t eat). I actually have a very bad knowledge of Chinese cuisine mainly for two reasons: the use of many ingredients I don’t eat (jellyfish, shark, seafood, meat…) and the spicy food from some regions. I would love for example to know more about Chinese zen cuisine but never actually heard about any. May be they just ate rice… but these beancurd noodles could have been something they ate… I’ll definitely try to find some information and get back to you soon if I find anything interesting!