More bad karma

Yesterday started badly. The pop-up mechanism in my toaster broke. I left it unattended for all of about a minute - in which time, it managed to completely incinerate two slices of brown bread and fill the entire apartment with acrid smoke. They were my last two slices of bread, so my plans for breakfast had to be downgraded to coffee and yoghurt.

Then I walked a couple of miles to my nearest decent phone store, to be there on the dot of opening time at 8.30am. The staff were all there at 8.30, but were disinclined to open up at the advertised time. They insisted on keeping me waiting outside the doors for another 5 minutes, for no discernible reason other than that they could (I have commented before on the apparent lack of a service ethic in this country). When I did finally get inside, I managed to instil some hurry-up in the clerks and was in-and-out inside 20 minutes - quite an achievement, considering how tortoise-slow most Chinese sales staff are. The only major hiccup was their perverse refusal to actually show me the phone and let me try if before taking my money off me. I've never had this problem before. Usually handling the phone and playing with the buttons, making sure it accepts your SIM card, is a standard part of the process. I can't imagine why they were being so obtuse about it this time; I had to ring a Chinese friend to get some assistance in getting my point across.

Then there were no cabs to be had. For nearly 15 minutes. I crossed to the other side of the Ringroad, by a subway station exit, but things weren't much better there. Lots of cabs, but all of them taken. When I did finally manage to flag one down, it pulled in 50 yards up the street, and before I could catch up with it, a Chinese girl appeared out of nowhere and stole it. Galling? Ever so slightly!

And when I did finally get one, the driver was painfully unwilling to take instruction on the best route. The 3rd and 4th Ringroads are prone to complete gridlock around that time in the morning just lately, but this driver seemed determined to try to get on them anyway. I thought I had convinced her to give up on the 3rd, and try Beitucheng Lu, midway between the 3rd and 4th..... but then, she sailed past the Beitucheng junction and tried to get on the even more log-jammed 4th! I dissuaded her, with difficulty, and instructed her to carry on going north to Tsinghua Donglu - this is actually about a mile further north from my destination, but it's a much clearer road than Chengfu Lu - which has an atrocious bottleneck at the Wudaokou light-rail station (compounded by a level-crossing over the railway line, and a string of unnecessary traffic lights along the south side of the Beijing Language & Culture University campus). My driver, of course, swung into Chengfu Lu, and we took about 10 minutes to cover the next half a mile. There was still a way out. I was not yet late for my recording appointment at the Peking University Press. Very nearly, but not quite yet. The turning into Wangzhuang Lu, the road running up the west side of the BLCU campus was a couple of hundred yards ahead. In China, you can turn right on a red light. And taxis can use the bus/cycle lanes; well, they're probably not supposed to, but they do. The bus lane was pretty empty; and two or three other taxis had swept past us along it, before swinging right into Wangzhuang Lu. The Wangzhuang Lu stratagem would, admittedly, have been a subtantial detour; but it would have circumvented the Wudaokou bottleneck, which was threatening to take us at least another 10 or 15 minutes to get past. I begged, I screamed, I pleaded, I gesticulated for all I was worth; my lady cabbie was just not having it.

So, I abandoned her; jogged half a mile to the other side of Wudaokou station; got another cab (eventually); and ran up the six tall flights of stairs at the University Press offices..... and thus arrived, wheezing and sweaty, barely 15 minutes late.

Not a great start to the day.

However, it was impossible to stay in a grump for long. Indeed, the blues that have been dogging me for the past couple of weeks were swept away by the spectacular weather. Friday was one of the most perfect days I have ever seen in Beijing: brilliant blue skies, hot sunshine, refreshing breezes, zero humidity.

It's impossible to feel down on such a day.

I'm not looking forward to trying to purchase a new toaster, though.