Imagethief is always mystified that any foreigner would go through the trouble to own a car in Beijing. I do have some friends who own and drive their own cars. I view them as dangerously adventurous and unpredictable, the way I'd view friends who owned private helicopters or bazookas in the United States. You have to be a danger-seeker to want to operate a motor vehicle in Beijng's psychotic traffic, or nurse some deep, inner urge to punish yourself. While most of the many traffic accidents I've witnessed in Beijing haven't been serious, most have looked like a colossal hassle, especially when foreigners have been involved.

Like owning a helicopter, owning a car seems unnecessary from a practical point of view. Taxis are cheap and abundant, if sometimes slightly uncomfortable (admittedly, I feel like a bit of a danger-seeker on some taxi rides, but when you're not in control of the vehicle you're forced to assume a Zen-like detachment in order to avoid a nervous breakdown). The subway is perfectly useable, although can be crowded at rush hour. I can hire a car with a reliable driver on the rare occasion when I need to get out of town or have a car for the day.

The other reason why car ownership in Beijing seems like a form of ecologically unfriendly self-flagellation is the challenge of keeping a car clean. I rarely see clean cars in Beijing. This is a marked contrast from Singapore, where every middle-class family has their maids was the car every single-morning. In sloshy-wet Singapore, which mainlines megatons of water from peninsular Malaysia for the specific purpose of keeping tens of thousands of white Mercedes sedans free of mynah-bird shit, this can be done. In arid Beijing it's a practical impossibility. So every car spends its days slowly disintegrating under a film of crud.

Nothing reminds how you dirty Beijing is like the state of its cars. Depressingly, any snowfall or rainfall leaves cars even filthier. We recently had the first, light spring showers. If you have studied your meteorology, you will know that every raindrop must "nucleate" around some kind of particle, perhaps a particle of dust, a bacterium, or some other mote carried aloft on the breeze. Beijing's raindrops must nucleate around gobs of dirt swept in from the Gobi Desert because every car looked like it had been sprayed with mud. Don't try to catch raindrops on your tongue in Beijing.

And then there is the sand.

Ah, the sand. I'd heard of Beijing's sandstorms before I arrived. As always, I let my imagination get carried away. I had visions of Bedouins huddled in the lee of their camels, of wind whipped sand flensing the flesh from bones, and so forth.

I was, in fact, pleasantly survived. My first two springs in Beijing I witnessed only two sandstorms, both of which were pretty mild. One blew through in about ten minutes, the other, last year, turned the sky grey and left the taste of grit in the mouth, but didn't leave much visible sign. This year has had a couple of dusty blows, but nothing that left much trace afterward.

Whatever blew through last night was different, though. Yesterday was cold and windy, and there was some dust on the breeze, but it was nothing compared to what must have gone through overnight. Apparently sometime during the night, the entire Gobi Desert picked up stakes and redeposited itself in metropolitan Beijing. This morning when I drew the curtains it looked like there had been a brownish-orange snowfall in our neighborhood. The roads, roofs and the nearby park were all a nicely uniform shade of dust. It was an object lesson in why you want to close your windows when you leave the house during Beijing's Spring.

It was also an object lesson in the value of paying for underground parking. Every car that had been parked outdoors was completely coated. Motorists had large brushes out --the kind you might use for snow in the Midwest-- and were trying their best to sweep most of the dust off their cars. I figure you'd want to deal with it as soon as possible. After all, if it were to rain after a dust storm like that, the resulting slurry would cement the doors of your car shut.

Like I said, who'd want the trouble of owning a car in this town?