I started today with some festive Christmas linguistics reading:

"Academic Reading" is a course title, not an idiotic statement of the obvious.

Chomsky, Radford, Cook, Ouhalla and I spent the morning together, humbug-ing away.

After that I called my parents, who had just finished eating a Norwegian Christmas dinner.

My mother is a cook of such quality that I generally don’t eat holiday meals if they’re not cooked by her. Mom always cooks Norwegian food for Christmas, and there’s nothing that could replace it.

With all that being said, I’ve not been home in a while, and I thought it would be nice to have some Scandinavian food on Christmas. I told my mother that I planned to go to the Beijing IKEA for Swedish food. She approved, but pointed out that their meatballs are Swedish, and thus inferior in taste, quality, and character to the Norwegian meatballs I’m used to. At first opportunity I’ll find her an apron with a Norwegian flag on it so to anchor  her cookbook jingoism.

(A quick aside: When the Monty Python movie Life of Brian was released, it wound up being banned in Norway. The Swedes proceeded to advertise the film as “So Funny It Was Banned In Norway.”)

The Beijing IKEA. Just 45 minutes on foot from 太阳宫 if you get lost.

The Beijing IKEA is far away from everything, at least, that’s how it seems if you arrive at the 太阳宫 (Taiyanggong) subway station (Line 10). It takes about an hour by foot to arrive at IKEA from the subway station. Of course, it might take less time if you don’t get lost.

IKEA is sort of diagonal from the subway station, on the other side of Taiyanggong Park (太阳宫公园). In fact, you can almost see the IKEA from the subway. So, it made sense to try to cut through the park to try to get there. After all, parks have more than one gate, right?

Wrong.

The park was almost completely empty, and looked like one of the sets from Children of Men. Creepy derelict toys everywhere. Signs said that the lake opens for skating tomorrow. The frozen lake is covered by a good inch of dust and dirt; I mistook the flags demarcating the skating rink for ringing off a paved go-kart course.

It was getting dark and horribly cold, so I hightailed it out of the park.

The IKEA restaurant is on the third floor. And it’s pretty great.

Swedish Christmas Dinner a la Beijing

Seconds (extra plate of salmon not pictured).

The only disappointment was the lack of that good lingonberry drink that you can get at IKEA in the States.

I was shocked to see most of the other diners eating spaghetti or Chinese food. A plate of spaghetti was ¥15. The salmon plate was also ¥15. How does it make any sort of financial sense to buy spaghetti at the same price as salmon? Had the spaghetti cost ¥6, sure. But ¥15?[1. Now you're not surprised I don't celebrate Christmas, are you?]

After stuffing myself there was a bit of walking through the store (prices are lower here on most items). Amazingly, the Beijing IKEA does have a little Swedish grocery store. There was no  bond-ost cheese or Swedish fish candy (!), but most of the other staples were available, including some Swedish vodka that I guess can’t be sold at IKEA stores in Washington State.

After some grocery shopping I caught bus 536 to 三元桥 (Line 10)…the station I should have come from in the first place.

Thank you, IKEA.

Happy Christmas and Happy New Year. Remember, religion isn’t necessary for morality: be good for goodness’ sake.

Polluted Beijing

Everything you’ve heard about Beijing’s horrible air is true. After I arrived, it took ten days before I saw blue sky.

Ten days.

On a typical day you can stare directly at the sun because there’s so much smog in the air.

When I lick my lips while outside (a favorite pastime in the cold, dry weather), they taste like saran wrap.

It seems like Beijing’s terrible air is caused by industrial pollution and car emissions more than anything else. As such, the pollution floats relatively high in the air and is non-abrasive. In contrast, the pollution in Pingyao came mostly from coal smoke and a huge copper smelter. That pollution seemed heavier, hung lower in the air, and was much more aggravating to the ENT tract.

The US Embassy in Beijing posts readings from their air quality monitors at twitter.com/BeijingAir. That link isn’t accessible from China due to censorship of twitter; however, the government’s firewall doesn’t block the site’s RSS feed.

Usually, the feed is depressing:

In all seriousness, this is some scary shit.

Every time I look at this I think, What’s it doing to my lungs?

Thanks to these, I didn't get sick in Beijing.

If I were to give one piece of advice to people coming to Beijing, it would be, Buy a sinus rinse kit before you come. The kit consists of a plastic bottle and hundreds of packs of salt and baking soda. Put the salt/soda in the bottle, fill with water, then hold the thing to your nose and squeeze. Yes, it’s embarrassing and gross to think about, but the damn things worked. I used it while in Beijing and didn’t get one sinus infection or any respiratory problems. The darn things work. Buy one before you go, or have some sent over. They’re worth it.