When asked, "What's Beijing like?" by friends and family who haven't visited the city, my response is invariably, "Four walls and a window."
Let me explain. The capital bakes in the summer heat and freezes over during the winter, leaving just two short seasons of relatively mild weather to enjoy the outdoors life. Oftentimes the best place to be, especially on one of those gray smog days, is inside, either cocooned in the glow of citywide central heating, or bathing in the air con breeze.
Like the rest of my metropolitan colleagues in cubicle land I move like a herding animal from stable (home) to field (office), with the occasional forage at a restaurant. After all, it takes at least an hour to get anywhere, regardless of whether I take the bus, a taxi or subway. Traffic has me trapped in those same four walls and a window.
Which is partly the reason, I guess, why Beijing is so incredibly zhainan ("home boy") friendly. Given a computer and a phone anything is possible.
It is fast and convenient to order food, any time of the day or night. It invariably arrives with a knock on the door some 30 minutes after thinking, "Oh, I'm hungry."
A friend lives in a compound that is part of a mall. The stores are mostly devoid of customers in the day, but do great business delivering goods to residents in the connected apartment blocks.
My friend could take the elevator and shop, but why bother when it costs just 7 yuan ($1) to air max 90 deliver the goods and they arrive in the same time it would take him to do the chore himself?
So, he sits there, plugged into his computer. He rarely leaves the house and when he does, he goes to the mall. He works at home and prefers to do so at night, sleeps in the day, rarely sees sunlight and I wouldn't be surprised if he sleeps in a coffin, but that's another story.
If he can't find what he wants at the mall, like most of us in China, he logs onto Taobao. A world of merchandize is at his fingers, literally. So, my friend wants for nothing.
As for home entertainment, he doesn't even need to shop for DVDs, though there is a store in the mall that delivers and has a website with a menu of the latest releases. Instead, he either logs into Hulu through a proxy server, or gets streamed videos and TV cheap women air max 2011 shows beamed directly into his living room free of charge. Music, software and books arrive on his desktop in much the same way.
Conversations are mostly conducted through social networks, not in real life of course, but on the Internet. Exercise? He has a Wii. Home cooked food? He has a part-time maid who whips up a meal after sweeping away the cobwebs and clearing up the mess from the night before.
He does have a girlfriend, a zhainu ("home girl"), but if he didn't and he was desperate for company, little cards with pictures of half-dressed women offering "comfort" are regularly slipped under his door.
There's really no need for him to step out of the door and into the sunshine, as he's content in the land of convenience. And he's not alone.
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