During the course of of doing whatever we do everyday, we stumble over things we cannot explain. Stuff that is strange, but that we pass over for lack of time or interest. We may ask “why?” but never seek an answer, because we are enwrapped by the stable operations and expections of daily life. For me, obviously, this daily life is not established yet. Here in Beijing I do a lot of stumbling around. The benefit of this is, however, that I do notice things, secrets of everyday life that puzzle me and that do remain with me until I find a solution, something I would not bother with back in Berlin.
So here is a list of small mysteries, some resolved, some not. Help me!
1. Police cars do not use sirens in Beijing. They have the lights and race around, but you do not hear them coming (to be honest, I like that, it’s already noisy enough here). Why?
2. Sometimes, especially around Tiananmen, you here a rattling sound similar to that of a Tie Fighter engine (for non-Star Wars nerds: a tie fighter is space-vessel used by the evil Empire to take over the Universe–usually comes in packs). So what is that sound? Well, this one is resolved. The sound comes from packs of flying pigeons who are owned and kept by a person and whose wings have been manipulated by their owner.
3. I get at least one electric shock per day. Not by the Chinese authorities, but by touching stuff in the appartment or elsewhere. Everything seems to be charged here. Why? (For sometime I had blamed our red sofa, but this cannot account for the charges outside of the appartment)
The answer is the dryness. We have desert-climate in Beijing, apparently also allowing for things to become charged. How this actually happens, I don’t know. So, if you study physics, tell me why.
4. When people on the sidewalk or on the bicycle lane approach you head on, they generally sidestep to the left, instead of to the right. This is surprising because traffic in China is right-sided, just as it is in continental Europe, so my expectation naturally is a sidestep to the right (from there perspective, of course). Why is this?
5. If people are sick, or do not want to become sick they wear a mask over their mouths (something I am considering given the continuing respiratory troubles here). I have wondered could we do the same in Germany? Because, as far as I know, in Germany it is largely prohibited to wear masks in everyday life (Vermummungsverbot).
6. In shopping centers the moving stairways both for going up and down are arranged parallely not alternately (as in German shopping malls). If you want to get up or down, at every level you have to walk around. Why do they arrange moving stairs like that?
6. Why do we?
Well, there probably is no deeper reason to this. Our system is not intrinsically better, or more logical. It does make a difference though. In Chinese malls I never have to back and forth trying to find the right stairway to go either up, or down. In Germany this occurs a lot, when having been on a floor for sometime and then returning to the stairways. On the other hand, it is a lot more work and time in China to go from the lowest to top floor because you have to walk around at every floor. This is, of course, no problem in Germany. However, if I simply alternate between too ‘adjacent’ floors (1 and 2, 2 and 3. etc) the system here appears easier to use. In any case, the question perhaps not why the different systems are what they are but rather how they actually structure our movement in shopping malls. Do they perhaps make a difference in defining what and how we buy things?