Follow Beijing infrastructure expert David Feng from Shunyi back roads to the last stop on the metro, blogging all the way.

HOME

8:00 a.m.Wake up. Yup, that's Gigi Leung playing on the iPod. Listen to a song before I unplug the earphones and jump out of bed.
8:05 Open up the curtains and get on my Mac. Zip through the emails from my 20+ accounts, nixing the ever-so-detested spam.
8:15 Quick check around the Web for morning Beijing news. They just came out with news of yet another subway line in the works! (And you thought Line 5 was the latest-and-greatest.) Update the Beijingology wiki.
9:00 Breakfast: bread, some biscuits, not much. I dream of my San Francisco days when breakfast was much more rewarding: melons, margarine and meiguo mianbao.

Car

9:45 After a quick email check, head out in my car. Next stop: investigating the scenic highways in Shunyi.
10:10 Hit the Jingcheng Freeway and reach the Baima Road exit a tad later.
10:30 Now for some work. The assignment: highway articles for the wiki. Requirements: snapshots of road signs, mileage markers and a view of the highway. Start-stop driving at times. Chinese, English and Japanese pop music in the background.
10:55 Back on Baima Road. Next challenge: locate the crossings and where they are, mileage markers come in handy! A lot of memorization needed.
11:10 Head further northeast. There's the Beihan Highway to do. We do the roads that even the road authorities don’t care about.
11:35 Ouch! The end of the Beihan Highway is yucky, muddy and “keng keng ba ba” (bad to drive on). Thank heavens I've my GPS and head onto a nearby route. Finally make it back on a trunk highway heading toward the city.

Yoshinoya

1:00 p.m. Quick lunch of rice, veggie and bai kai shui.

Metro Line 5

1:30 Park the wheels. Next stop: the subway. The assignment: photograph the inside and the outside of Line 5 stations. Snap the info panels so that I can update the first/last services info.

Metro Line 1

1:45 End up at the Dongdan interchange. Line 1 next.
2:30 A few stops later, I’m in far western Beijing. No central platforms out here, they're all side platforms. End up the Pingguoyuan station: it looks like a village shack!
2:40 Get my constitutional by walking around Fushi Road. Very few fellow pedestrians but the longest stream of cars the eye can take in. New Beijing, indeed! Then back to the subway, bell rings, doors close and I am off.

Teahouse

4:15 Chill out with green tea (good for you!) and upload the pics onto the Web. The devil lays in the details. Quick email check. Look around the Mac Web, do a bit of Web 2.0 stuff.
6:00 Still at the teahouse (Beijingologist teahouse breaks tend toward the long side). Quick trip along the Fourth Ring Road then back home.

Home

7:15 Dinner stretches to about 45 minutes. (I have that bad habit of taking in both food and information at the same time). The soup is about to run cold when I down the last of it.
8:15 Mix up a new iTunes playlist, the 12th so far this month. I used to do about 37 per month in the summer.
8:50 Send Mac group executives a quick email in English and Chinese. Quick Web news updates. Give some more thought to a new restaurant and bar standard for the wiki. Some quick Beijing news updates.
9:30 At the end of the day, it's a little SimCity 4 to the rescue. We just hope Beijing gets this many freeways and subways! Know all the cheats, so I'm off to create one killer city.
10:15 That'll do. Late night shower.
11:00 One last email check. Smile at a late incoming tweet from one of my Twitter friends. More work tomorrow! Fall asleep sometime later.