Cloudy in Beijing Blogging about my time in China

Cloudy indeed

I woke up Saturday morning to see that the sky had turned a mustard yellow.

The news reported that it was the biggest sandstorm of the year to hit China. Winds from the country's northwest region were carrying sand to Beijing and cities in the northeast. A sign of growing desertification as The Washington Post put it today.

I walked outside and didn't feel much dust in the air. Everything outside, however, looked as if it were polluted.

Indeed, the weather in China is kind of crazy. Fortunately, my timing couldn't be better.

On Saturday afternoon I left for Taiwan to see family. I'm hoping to escape the crummy weather in Beijing.

Here, I was walking through Beijing Capital International Airport at terminal 3, the newest expansion of the airport.

Direct flights between China and Taiwan only began about a year and a half ago as a sign of strengthening relations between the Chinese mainland and it's so-called "breakaway province" . Before you usually had to fly through Hong Kong or Macau, where you then changed planes. But now things are more convenient, with a trip from Beijing to Taipei equaling a swift 3 hour plane ride.

One visible result of the direct flights is that many of the passengers around me were Chinese mainlanders, who were traveling to Taiwan for the first time. By ending the ban on direct flights, Taiwan was in part hoping to boost tourism.

Still, the Taiwanese government has placed restrictions, and have a quota for the number of Chinese tourists that can enter the island each day. Recently they lifted the number for 4,311 to 6,000 to meet the overwhelming demand for tourist permits.

As for me, this is maybe my 9th trip to Taiwan. Before I left, I spoke with a few Chinese friends in Beijing. They all said they wanted to come with me, with one friend adding that she was "jealous".

In spite of flying hundreds of miles away, I still could not escape the sand storm as it spread itself across Asia. One local news report said it was the biggest sandstorm to sweep Taipei in 25 years. At least the sky is not yellow.