Vladimír Nádraský

“So they drove us two hundred and fifty kilometres, a beautiful highway. We spent a long time driving through Beijing. We saw how it grew in width, like Dubai. Just like Dubai grows wider into the desert and the sea, Beijing grows further and further to the south. And the smog is everywhere, but very slowly, as you start leaving Beijing, it goes away, but then there are all these factories. There are factories, industry, heating plants around Beijing. So as we learnt when the wind blows from Gobi, the rain turns red, when it blows from Siberia, there’s dry freezing weather, and when it blows from the sea you can smell the chemical plants by the sea and those factories around Beijing. So we saw Beijing, we saw the buildings fade away slowly and the factories and heating plants, and then we drove a long time through this – nothing, only trees were there. These are practically the lungs of Beijing, where they planted these weird forests that breathe. Even in the city you see green shrubs planted along the houses and roads. And then we were arriving, you spend a long time on the way and then you see a city in the distance. We asked that chargé d’affaires what it was. He said it was a village. We spent maybe half an hour travelling around it. It was bigger than Prague and he says village! There were several such cities in the distance, modern ones, with buildings with at least twenty-five floors. So next to the highway you see a wall of twenty-five floor buildings and that’s supposed to be a village. And it’s just like when you pass Prague. And then Mr. Jirsák told us that while Dubai has about a million inhabitants at night and three million during the day, this place has ten million at night and thirty million during the day. That’s like three of our republics.”