Beijing Beauty, part 5: Beijing Lights

Yes, the Olympics are over. Is the Western media gonna stop whinging about China though? Hardly. So Beijing Beauty ain't gonna stop either. (Well, at least not for another four parts.) Today's edition will be all about the lights of Beijing.

So Beijing is lit up at night. Nothing special, is it? Any place that wants to be able to call itself a city should invest in some nighttime lighting at some point. But I'm not talking about street lamps here. I'm talking about a sea of lights, in all colours and shapes. I'm talking about mall fronts, entrances, signs, even the ground. Come dusk (and that's around 7pm here, .even during the summer) the place lights up like a colourful wonderland. Sure, individual signs may look kitschy, and of course they cost a lot of electricity. But together they're impressive, hard take your eyes off, and they do give you that metropolis feeling.

And it's not just the main parts of the city that they're in. And all of those lights haven't been put up just for the Olympics to impress foreigners. Most of my photos below are from my area of Zhongguancun, which has a low density in Westerners, and they've been here ever since I arrived.

So enough of the talking, bring on the pictures!

Bis dann,

Nadine

The street outside my office in Zhongguancun

The fronts of a restaurant (left) and a shop on my way home (in comparison, my way home in Wuppertal, at night, looks something like this)

A blue building against (natural!) clouds and the moon

Nothing much in the way of lights here, but I love this picture- this is the view outside my 12th-floor office at sunset (the tall building is the one with the big e in the first picture)

The Watercube against a block of buildings that, at this point, had just turned pink (it keeps changing colours all through the night)

A lit-up gate on the Olympic Green

The waterfront at Houhai lake (which will get its own edition of Beijing Beauty soon enough)