About China blogosphere, travel, and entrepreneurship

There’s one thing that bothers me about Beijing: the stuff in the air. Today, we got haze, smog, and worse — the kind of weather that triggered this tweet from me:

Weather-wise, it looks like the weather gods puked in Beijing. Mix of sun, clouds, fog, mist, smog and haze. HALP…

I’m a big Facebooker, by the way, and I love those Emote cat emotions, so the “HALP” bit was pulled in from there. (If you use Emote, you should have an idea… those cute cats.)

Anyways, moving back on topic, the weather today was less than ideal. The air was less than ideal. It reminded to a less than ideal habit too many people are in the mood for here in the capital: smoking.

The city is a virtual chimney in its entirety. In the big outdoors, we already see too many people smoke their cigs — local or foreign brands. (Yours truly did not, does not, and will not, smoke.) Too many places are featured on cig packages — Tian’anmen (for Chunghwa), Zhongnanhai, and their ilk.

Inside those four walls (as in indoors), things are a bit different. Supermarkets and malls are, for the most part, smoke-free, but enter the traditional office or office meeting room, and the fumes poison you to the extent that you can’t take it anymore. I’ve even been semi-poisoned in the odd teahouse with too many avid smokers. It felt like hell on earth.

Thankfully, more and more places in Beijing are tobacco-free.

Let’s face it: being squashed in boxes with wheels, be they above-ground (buses) or underground (subways), is bad enough. Add the tobacco factor, and it becomes double hell on earth. This is no surprise, then, that smoking is banned in buses and trams.

OK, but what about taxis? Just a few months ago, if you didn’t smoke, your cabbie did. No amount of opening the windows would rid you of that horrible smell of tar, nicotine and tobacco.

Well, that’s the good news — just recently, taxis were officially made smoke-free. I can’t remember the date of the top of my head, but I guess this must have been an early 2008 move. (I might update this entry when I find out for real.) I say this since my last cab trip (in February) was smoke-free.

Smoking is banned, too, in many public areas. This means that you can enjoy that gorgeous Terminal 3 without those smokers distracting you. Increasingly, more and more restaurants offer a non-smoking area, too — which is, of course, where yours truly sits.

The limits on where you can smoke may eventually get to the extent that you might be tempted — to kick the habit altogether.

Oh yeah — and live a few more years.