Every time I come to Florida’s Kennedy Space Center to cover the space shuttle for the high definition TV network HDNet, I rent a bike first thing in the morning to get a little exercise before the day gets too hot. In its shortest form my route takes me about ten sweat-soaked miles, up and back along the hard-packed beach. But when I have the time, I add in some detours, including a couple of residential complexes for seniors. Except for a few big Buicks which scare the daylights out of me when I spot them over my shoulder coming on from behind, these places usually offer quiet palm-lined streets and light cooling breezes coming off the water.

They also offer a reality check. As I ride through and see men in white shoes and women in wedgies, I think to myself that I’m a long way from a place like this … and fool myself into thinking that if anyone happens to notice me riding by, they’ll think I’m there to visit my elderly parents. But silly me! A glutton for punishment, I stopped strolling seniors in two of these places while I was in town for the late-May launch of Discovery and asked, “What’s the minimum age here?” The answer was like a slap in the face when you’re already sunburned: “55.”

55? Been there, done that! I’m a leading-edge baby boomer, birth year 1946, which means 55 is just a pleasant memory. Try 61. I don’t look like I’m just visiting my elderly parents; I look like I am one of those elderly parents! Just as I learned the other day in a store near my home that they offer a 10% senior citizen discount on the first Wednesday of the month, and I could have gotten that discount for six years already if I had been smart enough to ask, I could have moved into one of these senior complexes in 2002! Who knows? Maybe all my shoes by now would be white too!

But it reminds me of the time a few years ago when I was covering a story in Los Angeles and called a female friend of my wife’s and mine who lives there, and we met for lunch in Westwood, which is the base of UCLA. After lunch we decided to take a walk, and ended up on Fraternity Row. It was Rush Week, so there were lots of college students walking around. And because we are young at heart if not of hair (my wife always laughs when I exclaim with wonder how remarkable it is that neither she nor any of our female friends has a strand of gray), we kind of thought we fit right in, and if anyone were to walk up and talk to us, we figured he’d invite me to “rush” his house. Silly us! When a guy finally did stop us, it was to ask if we needed any help finding our son’s fraternity house. I guess we’re lucky he didn’t say “grandson.”

The moral to the story? You’re only as old as you feel. But of course it’s not quite as simple as that, because age is measured two ways: how you feel, and how you look. Except for moments of denial (and they pop up more and more), I know I look my age. Of course that’s not always a bad thing; my mother is in her mid-80s and lives in a senior complex in San Francisco. Whenever I visit her there and we eat in the communal dining room, I spot some woman looking me over and thinking, “Hmm, fresh meat.” To her, I suppose I am, (and I hope Mom scolds her roundly for what she might be thinking), but the fact is, I qualify to live in that place too. Time marches on, and we can’t do a darned thing to stop it.

So I can’t control how I look, but I can still control how I feel, and here’s why I should: sometimes I ski with my two strong-healthy-fit-athletic 20-something sons. Mind you, they’ve both made a living on skis, so they’re pretty darned good, but I’m not bad either — for my age. However, that’s a key distinction: “for my age.” When I’m skiing, or for that matter mountain biking, with my wife or other chronological peers, we all feel pretty darned good about ourselves. Even young … “for our age.” But when I ski, or bike, with my sons, they’re Ferraris while I feel like a ’57 Plymouth.

Just a month or so ago, three other guys about my age and I made our annual trip to Moab, Utah, the Grand Canyon-like mountain-biking capital of the country. And on our toughest climb near the end of our longest ride, we were struggling up a slick rock ledge that any mere mortal would struggle to summit… when a young couple went racing past us so fast that the girl’s braided blonde ponytail was actually flying in the wind. So, here’s how I can control how I feel: stick to playmates my own age!

But now to the real moral to the story: time does march on, but except for the inevitable toll it may take on our bodies, we don’t have to live by the calendar. Our parents’ generation pretty much took a look at the calendar and said, “Well, I guess I’m too old to do such-and-such any more.” No you’re not! At least we’re not. When you consider all the bumps and grinds our limbs have suffered living the active lifestyle our boomer generation lives, we are obviously too old in some ways to perform as we performed when we were younger — that’s why we don’t see many boomers these days in anything from major league sports to the Olympics — but we’re not too old to perform!

I’ll just keep telling myself that as long as I can. Even if it means I keep fooling myself. It sure beats wearing white shoes and driving that big Buick!

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There are century bike rides each summer in Colorado. “Century” means, a hundred … as in, a hundred miles. But by the time you’re anywhere near the hundred mile mark, especially on century rides in a state where the altitude of mountain roads rises into the quintuple digits, you’re counting not just every mile but every single foot, which is why I’ll go to pains to point out, the total mileage usually comes out to more like 102, 103 … I remember one that ended up at 108 miles.

The earliest century ride in Colorado comes the first weekend in June; it’s called the Elephant Rock. It begins and ends in the small city of Castle Rock, a bit south of Denver, and every time I’ve ridden it, it’s made enduring memories. Some aren’t so sweet, from the route near the end that takes you up a hellishly steep hill I have nicknamed “the wall,” to the fierce southbound wind that makes the final northbound stretch along I-25 feel like a whole century ride itself!

But none is more memorable than my Elephant Rock ride in 2001. Why? Because I was just 54 years old but had a heart attack!

In retrospect, I’d had a couple of smaller heart attacks in the preceding week, while training my winter-idled body for the Elephant Rock on a small mountain called Bergen Peak in Evergreen, Colorado, where I live. I thought the burning sensation in my chest was heartburn or acid reflux, neither of which I’d ever had before, but there’s a first time for everything. So I kept riding.

Then, riding with a friend in the Elephant Rock, I had the same kind of burning, but stronger. So not long before the first official rest stop, I stopped. I told my friend what I was feeling, but being as ignorant as I am, he didn’t recognize the signs of a heart attack any more than I did. After being still for 10 or 15 minutes, we got back on our bikes … and finished the ride.

When I got home that night and told my wife what had happened, she was smarter than my friend and I were, and said, Get yourself to the doctor! … which I did, and when I had yet a fourth attack right there in his examining room, I barely had time to clutch my chest before he had me in an ambulance and, not long after that, in surgery.

The thing is, I asked my cardiologist — none of us has a cardiologist on standby; I met mine in the emergency room — whether my bike-riding had caused the heart attacks, or saved me despite them. His answer was something any bicyclist needs to know: because of the time I spend on bikes, my heart, which is a muscle, was strong. Strong enough to withstand the blood stoppages that blocked arteries were causing.

What caused the blockages was heredity — a propensity to develop plaque, which plagued both my father and his father with bad hearts. What kept me going, was biking.

And that’s why I ride my bike nowadays more than ever. Including a couple of Elephant Rocks since my open heart surgery in 2001. I don’t worry that it’s going to stress the heart; I’m confident that it’s going to keep it strong!

One immodest postscript: in September 2006 I was on the east coast for business, and at a friend’s urging I flew to New York City for the annual NYC Century Bike Tour. It begins in Central Park, cuts south through Manhattan, then goes through and around Brooklyn, and Queens, and the Bronx, and ends back where it started. I’m a leading-edge boomer, 61 years old, and ought to have been at the rear of the pack. But instead I kept riding forward from every pack I joined. Why? Because you can pedal your bike every day of the year in New York City and you won’t develop legs or lungs like a Coloradoan’s. And where do we get those legs and lungs? On rides like the Elephant Rock!

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If you’re a fisherman — actually, I’m told these days the word is “fisherperson” — you might want to stop reading right here. You’re not going to like the rest of this.

Here’s why: I think fishing is crazy.

Aside from the profits of pulling in the catch I enjoy at any good restaurant, I can’t see why anyone wants to go fishing. True, I grew up in a city, so you could attribute my attitude to the fact that fishing wasn’t a big part of my childhood. But that city was San Francisco, the “City by the Bay,” which might make you think that as city-boys go, I’d be into fishing. But I’m not. I still think it’s crazy.

Case in point: among other things that I produce for the high definition television network HDNet, I cover the space program. That means I’m in Florida a lot! Our production crews and I always stay in Cocoa Beach, one of the closest communities to the Kennedy Space Center, and my one piece of personal pleasure whenever I can squeeze it in is to get up early in the morning and rent a retro bike from a nearby surf shop — no suspension, no gears, and the kind of foot brake we had when we were kids — and ride along the sand from Cocoa Beach to Cape Canaveral. It’s always pretty much the same route: 5-6 miles up, 5-6 miles back.

And regularly, I’ve got to ride under the taut lines of the fishermen. Not that the fishermen are actually holding their poles; in fact they’re not even real close to them. No, they’re doing what I’d be doing, reclining in a beach chair watching the surf. These aren’t wrinkled seniors and they’re not soft-cheeked kids; the best I can tell is, they are, shall we say, “leading edge” baby boomers, just like me. But the difference between them and me is, I’d be watching the surf without a care in the world. They’re watching for a fish.

That’s what I’ve never understood about the sport. If someone goes fishing to be near a stunning mountain stream, I say, why not just go sit by the stream without the fishing pole?!? Who needs sharp hooks and smelly bait to bask in the beauty of the mountains? Same thing goes for fishing from a boat. For me, it’s about being in the boat with the calm sway of the waves and the cool breeze of the water … it’s not about what you’re likely to pull up from beneath it!

Mind you, I guess I understand the appeal of attracting a wily trout in a crystalline creek: choosing the right fly, finessing the line so you don’t lose your prize. And I can understand, even if I don’t appreciate, the thrill of fighting that fish you hooked from the back of a deep sea yacht. But that brings me back to the fishermen on the beach in Cape Canaveral. There just can’t be a whole lot of skill involved and if there’s not a whole lot of skill, how can there be a whole lot of satisfaction? I mean, they call it “surf fishing.”

They plant their poles in the sand, sometimes in a supportive plastic tube and sometimes just in the sand, and wait. If something tugs on the line, they pull it in. Of course they assure me it’s not nearly so simple as that and maybe it’s not, but I’ve watched and I gotta tell you, that’s all I see. Tug, pull, then yank out the hook.

So why do they do it? For the food?? I don’t think so, because for the couple of hundred dollars they spend on rod and reel — and many have two, three, four rods feeding lines into the water at once — they could buy plenty of fresh fish at the local supermarket. To be sure, sometimes they pull out a fish that’s a good foot to a foot-and-a-half long; the record catch in Florida of the most common fish they hook here — something called the Black Drum — was more than 90 pounds. I never even heard of a Black Drum before I started coming down here and therefore certainly wouldn’t eat one! Anyway, what I usually see these guys pull out of the ocean is typically about as long as a tube of toothpaste; I don’t think that comes anywhere close to 90 pounds! It’s hardly big enough to take to the taxidermist.

And if you’re not yet convinced that fishing is crazy, how about the guy I came across the morning I wrote this?! There I was, just like I always am, riding right along the edge of the surf where the sand is firm and the mist is cool, and I come to a row of three rods planted in the beach. One scrawny little fish has just been hooked, and the guy who hooked it has just pulled it out of the water. So it’s flapping around on the sand just as I’m riding under the rods….and that’s when this guy screams, “DON’T RUN OVER HIM.” Do you see where this is going? This fisherman has just stuck a barbed hook into little fishy’s cheek, then pulled him out of his survivable environment so he can suffocate in ours, and this guy’s afraid I’m going to hurt the fish! Crazy?

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It must be twenty years since I last came to Russia — ominously, in retrospect, it was the Soviet Union back then. So since getting to Moscow on Columbus Day a week ago (which they don’t celebrate here; go figure), I’ve been watching for what’s new and what’s not. There have obviously been changes on major levels — capitalism has taken over, personal freedoms can be exercised, and the politics of the nation have been like a ride on a roller coaster. Both on the surface and deep down, this looks like a New Russia. But it would be a mistake to assume the Russians look just like us.

My initial image of the New Russia came before my Aeroflot flight even took off for Moscow from London. First of all, it wasn’t a creaky old Tupolov, the homemade aircraft that was the mainstay of the Soviet airline Aeroflot (we used to nervously joke that “Aeroflot” meant “Will it float?”). Now, it’s a shiny new Airbus 321, complete with toilet seat covers in the bathrooms. And since my trip was destined at best to be 26 hours door-to-door, Colorado to Moscow, I was happy to note that in contrast to the old days, we left London pretty much on time. Nowadays, it’s not an all-proletariat plane either; there are two classes of service, although in a nod to the good old days, the front section where everything from the seats to the service is clearly First Class is humbly called Business Class. I wasn’t up front of course — I get no frequent flier perks out of my comfort zone — but even back where I sat in coach, there was a meal. Kind of an Old Russia meal but still — United, listen up — it was a meal!

More important, I saw the New Russia in the plane’s passengers. Because Aeroflot still doesn’t have a first class reputation, foreigners generally try to take any other airline in and out of Moscow, so almost everyone else on the plane was Russian. And many of them were young, 20s and 30s. The first thing I noticed was their mood. In the Soviet era, people generally looked dour. They had their share of laughs at home over a vodka but publicly, they were conditioned to keep everything — their opinions, their grievances, even their moods — to themselves. That has changed. It was like watching a group of vivacious vacationers leaving Las Vegas (the winners, anyway).

The next thing I noticed were the women. In a Russian sort of way they were sexy and stylish: bare midriffs, spiked heels, jeans that must have been ironed on. But I looked at them, and the young men with them, with a kind of cautious curiosity. That’s because I was heading here to do a documentary on an already divisive youth movement supported by President Putin that appeals to the nationalistic dreams of young people to restore the old glory of Old Russia. The movement is called “Nashi” which in Russian means “Our team,” “Our people,” or just “Ours.” I had to wonder, could these attractive, modern, stylish young people be part of Nashi’s core?

There is nothing wrong with the dream of nationalism, unless it is misdirected. In fact, wherever I’ve been in the world, I’ve always sensed either a strong sense of nationalism, or almost none at all. After all, nationalism is about more than one’s birth within a set of political borders. Nationalism is borne of pride in a nation’s history, whether it’s a history of empire or innovation. What I’ve found over the years is, Libyans, for example, aren’t particularly nationalistic, nor are Nicaraguans or Venezuelans or Kenyans or Kuwaitis. They may be proud of something their country has accomplished and feel supportive of its present policies. But that’s not necessarily nationalism. On the other hand, in a nation like Egypt, which is now an economic and political mess, the people I’ve talked to through thirty years of visits there, right down to the lowest of the low, burst with nationalism; that’s because their ancestors once accomplished things we don’t understand even today. It’s the same in Iran, you hear it in Peru, you see it in China and India and Israel (remember, the word “nation” defines people more than territory). Of course the Brits and the French are great nationalists. As we are in the U.S.A.

The fear of some in Russia right now, though, is that the nationalism of the young in this long-strong, long-suffering, long-proud nation will be channeled the way nationalism was channeled in Germany in the years before World War II, to support whoever leads them and trample those in opposition. There already are signs of it. Today’s young Russians are the first generation to come of age since the collapse of the Soviet Union. They haven’t been told stories of the bad old days of Communism so much as they have been told stories of the good old days of Superpowerism.

One of the first small signs I saw that modern times haven’t completely swept the country came the moment I got through Customs at the airport upon my arrival and walked into the baggage hall — there were so many people smoking there, the place could have been on fire and you wouldn’t have known. And, picture the amenities of Old Russia in the airport men’s room: the sole bar of soap on the counter was one of those little round jobs, not an inch across, the kind of thing you’d expect to find in someone’s powder room. And there was one hot-air hand dryer … which didn’t work. I often rail against all the electric-eye contraptions you have to use these days in airport restrooms in the U.S. to turn on the water and squirt your soap and take your towel. But Moscow’s airport (this was the old airport; there’s a new one that I assume is more modern) could use a few of them now.

But there also were visual cues for the New Russia in the first ten minutes riding into the city, like shiny showrooms for Ford and Audi and Nissan. They were dazzling, as if neon is a magnet. This is a far cry from the old days, when most people didn’t have cars at all and when they did, they were made by the same factory that made the country’s pots and pans. Once when I came here for ABC News, our bureau needed a new Volvo and our Moscow-based American producer, Maria Casby, had to fly to Helsinki to buy one and drive it back. She told me a funny story about that drive that helps define Old Russia. Maria was making better time on the road than she’d anticipated, so she passed the exit ramp for a town where she had a hotel reservation for the night, but within a couple of miles a police car raced up behind her and stopped her and the officer got out and said “Miss Casby, you missed your exit.” The authorities knew not only exactly who she was from her license plate; they also knew precisely where she was supposed to sleep, and when (that’s how police on street corners used to track our movements around Moscow; you’d see them glance at your plate, whose color, letters, and digits identified you, then call ahead to the cop on the next corner).

A car and driver had met me at the airport, and when we got into the car, he pressed a radio button and who pours from the speakers but Frank Sinatra! Western decadence at its finest. I assume the driver tuned into this particular station in deference to me, but when I seemed to show little interest, he pushed a new button and for the rest of the ride, the radio blared music to which you might see Cossacks dance. New Russia and Old Russia meet on the radio dial.

Anyway, those bright automobile showrooms in New Russia — not to mention not one but two ubiquitous McDonald’s in those first ten minutes from the airport, and even a huge theater featuring IMAX — are a huge change from Old Russia when there was virtually no retail advertising because there was no competition; the state owned everything (even, believe it or not, the shoe shine kit that some kid would use to shine your shoes on the sidewalk). If you went out to buy shoes, the store had an unlighted sign out front that just said “Shoes.” Not “Greg’s Shoes” or “Macy’s Shoes,” just “Shoes.” Or “Food,” “Toys,” whatever. Why advertise when there’s no place else to shop?! But nowadays on the façade of GUM (“whom”), Moscow’s venerable department store directly across Red Square from the Kremlin, bright lights advertise for Dior and Louis Vuitton. Who’d have thunk it?!

Almost everywhere I’ve ever gone, lights have helped define a place. When they are bright, they often are a symbol of peace, and prosperity, and life. On the other hand, the worst place I’ve been in recent years is Liberia, west Africa, in which the national infrastructure was destroyed by 15 years of civil war, including the hydroelectric dam that powered the whole country. As a result, aside from generators, there is no electricity and at night, no light. Lights aren’t just about illumination; they are a sign of civilization. But an even more vivid illustration of the symbolism of light is burned into my memory from a night in 1981 when I boarded a train for Poland; it was the night after martial law was imposed to quell the Solidarity revolution, and Warsaw’s airport was shut down. ABC had found a Polish train stranded in West Berlin and they were selling tickets to go home. I flew to West Berlin and got to the train station and got on at midnight; we would cross through East Germany and roll into Poland. The sky was dark but the tracks traversing the Berlin Wall were elevated (and flanked by barbed wire) and no one had to tell me when we were passing from West to East. There was a clear line of demarcation in the lights, bright and even garish on the west side, glum and dull on the east. Aside from its illuminated monuments, the Moscow of Old Russia used to be like that. Not any more, not in the New Russia!

To the contrary, the New Russia is like a flattering copy of our richest institutions. For instance take that department store, GUM. Dior and Louis Vuitton on the outside, and inside, everything from Levi to LaCoste. The prices are an even better example than the names. I wandered into the Levis store, figuring that I could do a fair price comparison of a pair of Levis in Russia with a pair in the United States. But there was no comparison. Converted from Russian Rubles, a normal pair of Levi jeans in Moscow costs $140; $140 at home would keep me in jeans for a lifetime! Just outside Red Square facing the Kremlin wall is the National Hotel, a stalwart house of bourgeois quality through all the years of proletariat Soviet rule. At the National Hotel, Beef Stroganoff is $50, a Rib Eye steak, $100. If you go there to dine, go for the Beef Stroganoff; that’s the bargain.

The cheapest decent hotel room I found available on short notice in Moscow is $1,600 a night; some kind of gathering was taking place and it was too late to get anything cheaper. So a colleague found a flat — a rent-by-the-night apartment in a middle-class neighborhood about three miles north of the Kremlin. It was cheap — about $250 per night for three of us, and perfectly clean, even fairly spacious. The trouble is, the building is like some discredited U.S. public housing project from the ‘60s, complete with the smell of urine in the dirty, dark, cement stairwell. A Russian colleague who went with us to get us settled told us, Do not under any circumstances open the door! There were four metal doors to traverse just to go in and out, but his warning was, If it isn’t a career thief who takes your property in Moscow, it might be a cop, so do not open the door.

Well, on the second night, a buzzer rang, and rang and rang. I figured it might be our camera crew, who had dropped us off only 30 minutes earlier. Or, the rental agent, who had to return some registration forms. So after weighing the options, I did undo the locks on the first three doors and stepped into the stairwell, only to face one guy in a black turtleneck and black leather jacket and black pants, and another in a police uniform. “Passport, passport” the plainclothes guy demanded. My colleague came out behind me, and he knows a little Russian, and was able to demand IDs from them, but whispered to me that we had to keep them out of the apartment. The story has a happy ending — they had had a complaint about noise, evidently because of our predecessors in the rented flat. But when we told our Russian colleagues about this later, they said we really lucked out; that no one is more dangerous than the local cops.

Still, this is a better place without the Soviet system. I think almost all would agree. Despite the way Putin has chipped away at political democracy, personal freedoms in the New Russia, so far at least, are protected. The very fact that we were able to sit and interview five different critics over three days in Moscow, with a camera rolling, proves that. It was a stark contrast to how things were back in the days of the Old Russia, when I had people approach me a couple of times to tell me about something they wanted to protest. But they didn’t just walk up and start talking. More like a Cold War spy film, they might make your pace their pace as you’d walk down the sidewalk, and try talking without moving their lips. Or they’d look carefully and sometimes constantly over their shoulders as they’d sidle up to have a fast conversation. People always thought they were being watched, and if they were trying to interact with imperialist journalists like us, they probably were.

Today in the New Russia, they can not just speak openly, but they can read once-forbidden books, travel out of their government’s sphere of influence, and even hold public demonstrations, at least small ones. Just yesterday, we were driving through Moscow when we passed about a dozen men from a town outside the city, standing silently on a sidewalk holding printed signs. It turns out, they were right across the street from the headquarters of United Russia, Putin’s political party. We stopped to videotape their demonstration and find out what it was about. They were there to protest the government granting a rich supporter the right to develop a piece of property which they had been using for many years to park their cars. Not exactly an issue of global import but nonetheless, it never would have happened in the Old Russia; trust me!

But there was still a touch of the Old Russia in these New Russia demonstrators. At a certain point while I was talking with their spokesman, another man suddenly noticed that some of them had their heels on the grass beyond the edge of the sidewalk. He quickly told everyone to make sure they kept their shoes on the cement and off the grass; he obviously was still mindful of the days when the authorities might use something as small as stepping on the grass as a pretext to arrest people for trespassing and destroying public property (and of course everything in the bad old days was public property). This small incident reminded me of a December day in the early ‘80s when we got word that there would be a human rights demonstration not far from the Kremlin, which amounted to activists stepping anonymously one at a time out of a rush hour crowd during a blizzard and placing a flower at the base of a statue. To do that, they had to step over a chain maybe ten inches above the ground and put a foot in the dirt around the base, which was enough for the KGB to roughly pull them away and bundle them off (we knew they were KGB when we got there because they were the only guys standing around with three inches of snow on their shoulders; no one else was crazy enough to just be hanging around in a blizzard. We also knew because they all had the same shoes!). They also tore TV cameras off the shoulders of our crews and even kicked in CBS’s lens. Ours was the only video to survive; we surreptitiously got it into New York and made it available to our competitors.

I’ll end with one more comparison of the two Russias, Old and New. It is comparatively trivial, but deliciously symbolic. In Old Russia, you wouldn’t have found a public porta-potty on the street. The Soviet government, after all, was infamous for its failure to proactively improve people’s lives. Now, in New Russia, I have seen several. But unlike porta-potties in the U.S.A., which anyone can walk into for free, I noticed at least two here that had babushkas — little old ladies — sitting on the toilet seat inside one porta-potty with the door open and snow and sleet blowing in. They were the attendants, all ready to hand you a piece of tissue and take your kopeks — a few pennies — before you do what you need to do. So New Russia meets Old Russia again — Just don’t forget to pay!

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China is big news these days. But it was not as a journalist that BoomerCafé co-founder Greg Dobbs and his wife toured the crowded country that remains somewhat mysterious to westerners … they were on a well-earned vacation and had set out to learn all they could about China and its people. Now back home in the U.S., Greg shares his notes …

There are so many things to say about China: it is packed with people; it is now more modern than we dreamed; it is still more backward than we thought. But perhaps the most cogent question to ask about China, especially in relation to the United States, is, “And we’re scared of exactly what?”

Yes, China is huge: 1.3 billion people in a land mass not a whole lot bigger than ours; you feel it everywhere you go. Maybe the best metaphor for how many people there are is that when you’re walking down a sidewalk or through a store or a marketplace and your arm bumps someone else’s, no one says “Excuse me.” There’s no need; everyone expects to be bumped.

And yes, China’s economy is hot, growing at a faster rate than ours.

But in the U.S., we only have to divide our GDP, our Gross Domestic Product, by about 300 million people to see what each of us is turning out and to what degree we’re prospering; divide theirs by 1.3 billion and you start to see how hard it will be to keep raising the Chinese standard of living. It is higher than it has ever been, but when a bartender on a boat ride down the Yangtze River told us he can only afford to take a date to McDonald’s about once a month you begin to understand prosperity in relative terms.

Minimum wage in China is the equivalent of less than a hundred bucks a month; pensions for government employees are the same. On the other hand, while incomes by our measure are still quite low — apparently the annual average in the nation runs between four and five thousand dollars and plenty of unskilled workers earn all of 60 cents an hour — taxes are low too. I was told that the total tax burden is something on the order of five percent. Then again, you get what you pay for.

But the standard of living, one measure of the Middle Kingdom’s leap into the Global Economy, indisputably is going up, which is obvious wherever you look; the skyscrapers in Beijing and Shanghai might be a metaphor for both growth and modernization. Steel and glass, and sky cranes hoisting more steel and glass, in every direction. Not just in a single “downtown” core, but stretching out for miles. In Shanghai, which is the financial capital, the tallest tower is a new 88-story building that looks like a combination of the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings in New York.

But development has come with a price. There are endless stories of people being uprooted from their homes without benefit of appeal because the government — or a private developer — has a better idea for how to use the land on which they live (of course we have eminent domain, but it is pale in comparison). By the way, “land” in China is an interesting concept; the Chinese nowadays are entitled to own their homes and their stores, and farmers can own their crops — but no one actually owns the land. That is still the province of government … and helps explain why it can relocate anybody it likes, at will.

Having said all that, my most vivid and lasting impression of China is, it may be the most polluted place on earth. I don’t mean the streets; to the contrary, you see people everywhere in bright orange suits with rustic long straw brooms, sweeping the streets (and usually wearing a surgical mask over the mouth, which tells you something about the air). On the Yangtze, we saw lots of what they call “trash boats” with people who are paid by the government to stick handheld nets into the water and scoop out the floating debris.

But the pollution is in the water — you simply don’t drink water from a tap, not even in a luxury hotel— and more obviously, the air. For a couple of hours on a couple of days, we saw snatches of blue sky. But that was it. Otherwise, it was bleak and brown.

Very sad, and a reflection of how fast China has modernized and industrialized. There hasn’t been time, or evidently inclination, to worry about emissions from cars or factory smokestacks. The factories run mainly on dirty coal, which is abundant in China, and now they’re paying the price. I’ve been told that for the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, they’re going to ban cars from the city (or charge them so exorbitantly that it’s as good as a ban) and shut down factories in the area weeks or months before the foreign visitors arrive. Pity the poor athlete who has to gasp for air.

On the other hand, the Olympics should be good for China, because as we’ve seen in other countries with similar political systems, once the system gives way even a little bit, it’s hard to go back to the old one at all. This pertains to levels of prosperity for citizens, and levels of openness for foreign visitors. A high-ranking Chinese Olympic official told a Newsweek correspondent when he remarked on a refreshing new era of relative openness for journalists, “Once we open our doors, we won’t be able to close them.”

But for any flowering of freedoms, there are still plenty of things you won’t see out in the open in China. Gay couples. The disabled (the closest thing you see to any kind of accommodation are ramps at tourist sites that have about a 20 percent grade; try pulling your wheelchair up something like that!). Women behind the wheel. Visible signs of religion; aside from the preservation of ancient sites that reflect the religious practices of obsolete dynasties, people did talk to us about their religious freedom … but we saw nothing.

You also won’t see a shortage of staff. Anywhere. It is probably a reflection of two things: China’s mammoth population, and its way of perpetuating full employment, which is still on the Communist agenda. In any event there are people to help you absolutely everywhere you go (at least in the kinds of places western tourists like us go). As a result, none seems to have a whole lot to do. In fact probably the busiest guy we saw on the whole trip was on a steep street in the city of Chong’qing. He was climbing the hill carrying a heavy load of four fully packed cardboard cases, two on each side of him, suspended on ropes from a three or four foot long bamboo rod cutting across the back of his neck. He and others who do this painful looking work are called “bamboo stick soldiers.” Personally, FedEx seems more humane.

By the way, you’ve probably never heard of Chong’qing. We were in several cities we had never heard of, even though their populations overshadow all but the biggest western cities. In fact in a couple we were told, “Oh, we’re not a big city;” they had populations only in the two- to three-million range. But Chong’qing? The “municipality,” which is quite large geographically, has a mere 32 million people. Almost the population of the whole state of California!

Now, here’s one more thing you won’t see in China: large families. As you might know, they still have an official “one child policy,” which means you will be fined, and fined big-time, for having more than one child. There are exceptions; if a rural family has a girl first, they can try again. And “minorities” (Chinese minorities) are permitted to have bigger families; I figure it’s China’s way of preventing their extinction. One woman told us of the policy’s benefits, mainly, that her parents poured all their affection and all their resources into her. Frankly, when you move through China and realize that you just don’t go very far without seeing lots of people, you can understand how necessary they might believe their one child policy is. Yet there’s still something chilling about a government telling me how many children my wife and I can have. Maybe the solution to the population problem is implicit in the phrase our male guide in Xian used to describe marriage: “Entering the tomb.”

I just mentioned “minorities” and we had a fascinating conversation with one guide, in the city of Guilin, about minorities. On the road in from the airport, she asked where we came from. Since we reside in the Rocky Mountains, I told her we lived in America, near the middle of the country, in the mountains. And her response was, “So you are minorities.” Evidently only minorities in China (and they count 55 minorities) would live in the mountains, so naturally that’s what she assumed about us.

Then in a later conversation we got an even more amazing glimpse. She asked us, “What do you think of white people?” We probably looked kind of shocked, and told her, “We are white people.” She patted her own cheeks and said, “No you’re not. Your skin has color.” What we learned is, this woman (and who knows how many more?) thought that the dominant population in America is the color of snow. It tells you something about the continued isolation of the average Chinese. They do have Internet access, although everything I’ve ever read tells me that content is still fairly heavily censored by the authorities.

So there seem to be five things that are growing in China, for better or worse. One is population. Another is pollution. A third is tourism. A fourth of course is the economy. And the fifth is congestion. There are still bikes all over the place — my wife and I rented bikes ourselves a couple of times, including one challenging day riding around the Forbidden City and through the forbidding streets in bustling Beijing. But of all the bikes I saw, probably thousands that I noticed, none was a newish kind of recreational bike. People ride bikes to get from one place to another. And lots of them are laden with huge loads over the back wheel, sometimes over the handlebars too. And they compete with motorbikes, and motor scooters, and motorcycles, and cars and taxis and trucks and pedicabs and buses. The only two pieces of advice I can offer about negotiating the streets of a Chinese city are, when it comes to a question of right-of-way, you have to challenge your adversary; winner takes all. And, don’t assume a one-way street is a one-way street!

While I’m at it, if you ever go to China (and this is true for other places too), here is a bit more advice:

1. Have someone at your hotel write your destination in Chinese on a piece of paper so you can show it to the taxi driver. And carry something with your hotel’s name in Chinese so you can make it back home.
2. Learn a few words in the local language (Mandarin Chinese), which I do wherever in the world I go and it buys you a lot.
3. If you don’t want to buy something from a vendor hounding you on the sidewalk, don’t even look at her or him. And definitely don’t show any interest. And if it’s something you do want to buy, hold tight to your money until you’ve bargained … and the deal is done.
4. Don’t go in the hellish heat of summer!

So far, I’ve written more about what we learned and felt than what we did and saw. Like the Great Wall. We must have climbed about 600 steps in the couple of miles of the wall that we hiked on a day as hot as a furnace, and it was thrilling. There are soldiers’ huts evenly spaced along its length, no further apart than the distance that two arrows (one from each hut) could fly. In a recent contest, the Great Wall was named one of the seven manmade Wonders of the World. Deservedly so.

And there’s something near the city of Xian (“she-AHN”) that ought to be the 8th Wonder. The archeological discovery known as the Terra Cotta Warriors. It is an army of life-size clay soldiers, clearly made by a living army of slaves, and first found in the early 1970s by a farmer digging a well. An emperor in the period around 240 BC had them fashioned, then buried in standing formation near the site of his tomb, in keeping with the custom of having things around you in death that you might need in the next life. They are still excavating, but already have uncovered thousands and thousands of cavalrymen, and infantrymen, and officers, and archers. No two faces are alike. Guides will tell you that the ones with the fat bellies are the generals. Some of us would have done well in this emperor’s army!

But so much of the older China is gone now, never to be seen again. On the other hand, these days you’ll see a society in transition both physically and politically. And arguably also in shambles. We flew out of Shanghai on an overnight non-stop to Vancouver, in western Canada. All the cabin window shades were shut before it got dark outside so people could watch movies. But I looked out the window. And I saw stars. It occurred to me that in 16 days in China, I hadn’t seen a single star. For the time being in much of China, stars are only part of the past.

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