The weather is getting hotter by the minute and the smog is spreading out like big blanket over morning traffic. Standing on the bus I’m watching the Traffic Channel. On these very beaten up buses, where there are even massive holes in the thick plastic flooring from millions of feet climbing in and out the bus every day, someone actually decided to install quite flashy DVD screens.

A perky girl in a pink T-shirt is updating us on the major traffic jams, side-kicked by a handsome but serious-looking police officer. Flashes of the Third Ring Road are shown, where traffic is snailing along in a white cloud of fumes. It’s all very meta, there I stand, surrounded in a cloud of fumes, watching other people in cloud of fumes. Of all weird things, I almost feel a connection with these strangers on the screen. We are the ones starting off our days by sticking our heads into one of this planet’s most polluted atmospheres, twice daily.

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 So the Big Event at the office is getting closer. Emails are sent back and forth, materials are missing and somewhere in the middle of this mess my Chinese boss manages to keep the face of a Buddha. Some major networks have announced their interest and I’m just hoping the whole thing will work out alright.

My colleague told me an awful story. Having lunch she suddenly saw a migrant worker rushing out from a construction site next door, waving like crazy, trying to get one of the taxis to stop. After him came a group of other workers, carrying a wounded man. If you’ve been in Beijing you know that the streets are usually hoarded with taxis, yet noone stopped at the sight of the wounded migrant worker and his friends. Not one.

I see these poor guys every day from my office window, their helmets tiny yellow spots floating along the streets. The unemployed ones are hanging around the area on their rusty bikes, holding signs offering their skills to anyone interested.

 Apparently CCTV showed a Labour Day TV show on May 1st, a gala tribute to ‘all the workers out there’. In one number dancers dressed like oil rig workers in bright orange overalls bounced around on the stage. In a song the singer sentimentally pictured how one of China’s great rivers is now ‘peacefully floating around the Three Gorges’.

A little interpretive dance on coal mining and the irony would be complete, it seems.

You have to love the bus guys. Dressed in bright yellow Mao-style jackets and equipped with little red flags they are the kings and queens of the Beijing bus stops. My bus stop is looked after by little weathered old man and a woman, perpetually looking west, waiting for the over packed buses to arrive. When a bus approaches, they suddenly raise the flag with their left arm and give three short, snappy waves, perfectly synchronized. Flags down, and with the right hand they gently wave the bus in, again their moves in perfect harmony like two Russian ballet girls.