Snark goeth before the eating of a generous helping of crow.

I owe Beijing an apology. On Thursday and Friday I lamented the return of Beijing's air pollution to what I assumed was status quo ante. But yesterday was one of those days --of which Beijing gets a mere handful each year-- that make you realize how time here erodes your standards for a "nice day". Any day where blue is visible at the vault of the sky is "nice", even if blue fades to sooty yellow at the horizon.

Not so yesterday. It was though someone had peeled waxed paper off of every surface in the city. Colors, textures and edges were suddenly everywhere. The zenith was blue, and the blue continued all the way down except where it was interrupted by white clouds. The Northern and Western hills were sharply visible in the distance, not just the vague suggestion of hills that they normally are.

If I needed proof that Beijing has a sense of humor, this was it. The city waited until all of its Olympic guests had left and then dropped the last of its veils and wallowed in unselfconscious glory. Take that, Olympic carpetbaggers! You could have run for endless kilometers in air like that.

Which is pretty much what I did, running along the Tonghui He both days. On Saturday I ran to the east, and around Gaobeidian Reservoir. On Sunday, when the air was truly magnificent, I ran west, toward downtown, with the Western Hills in front of me. I wrote two years ago about walking along Tonghui He, but I started running it just two or three weeks ago to add some variety to my normal Tuanjiehu routes. It was much less nasty than I remembered, although hardly gorgeous. There are some interesting old neighborhoods wedged between the banks and development to the north and railway lines to the south.

The canal isn't the only thing that was better than I remembered. On Sunday we also took Zachary for a walk through Chaoyang Park. Perhaps it's because my last walk through the park was a late autumn one nearly two years ago, or perhaps there has  been some Olympic refurbishment, but I remembered Chaoyang Park as being rather desolate and bare. It was neither. While it doesn't manage the historic charm of Beihai or some of the big temple parks, it was pleasant and leafy and simply awash with families.

It was also awash with brides. Literally dozens of them, all over the park, all having their photographs taken for bridal albums. (Five years ago in Singapore, Imagethief and Mrs. Imagethief did something similar, although instead of going the park, which seemed dull, we made our photographers drive around until we found an enormous, abandoned backhoe near Changi airport and posed on top of it. That's just the kind of people we are.)

I don't know if these brides simply lucked into clear air on their appointed day, or if their are legions of photographers waiting on call for good weather, but there they all were. It was like an infestation of celebrity princesses, with girls in poofy white dresses prancing among the trees, often followed by teams of photographers and slightly sheepish looking young men in tuxedos in various unfortunate shades of blue.

It made me wonder how one gets rid of an infestation brides. When I lived in Singapore there was an aggressive program to trap the crows that infested the city. One technique involved enormous, wire cages with one-way doors placed in crow-friendly areas. The bait was generally a suspended, pink plastic bag of the kind that might contain two or three steamed buns from the local hawker center.

A similar technique might work for all these brides mincing about the park. A few large, wire cages with one-way doors and the appropriate bait --perhaps a Cuisinart, a Chery QQ or the deed to a new flat in Wangjing-- and we'd soon have that bride problem licked. Then they could all be relocated to a shopping mall, or the church on Wangfujing which, I am sure we all agree, is much more humane and environmentally friendly than poisoning them.

Note: Imagethief promises not to write about the weather or brides again any time soon.