Perhaps this "going to Beijing for a year to work on my Mandarin" idea has some problems.

[randomness]

Leaving aside the fact that the Chinese internet authorities appear to have banned access to LJ, there's this, from http://jamesfallows.theatlantic.com/archives/2007/07/beijing_olympics_countdown_air.php:


"View to the south, July 26, 8:30am, from apartment building in the Chaoyang Park neighborhood of Beijing. The obscured buildings in the "distance" are perhaps 100 yards away."

Yecch.

Thanks to quezz, who made me think of this problem in a post of her own.

Comments

[esmerel.livejournal.com]

Wow, that makes LA look like the garden of Eden. Ew.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

Funny you should mention LA:

"Randy Wilber is an air pollution connoisseur. Senior sport physiologist for the US Olympic Committee, he has made five trips to Beijing since March 2006, lugging an air-quality monitor to all 31 Olympic venues. The city's atmosphere, he says tactfully, is "significantly worse" than that of Los Angeles, the US standard for big-city pollution. Then there's the heat. In August, Wilber recorded daytime temperatures consistently in the 90s, with relative humidity approaching 95 percent. "For endurance events," he says, "that's borderline hazardous." His overall assessment: "Not good.""

(From http://www.wired.com/science/planetearth/magazine/15-08/ff_pollution?currentPage=2.)