SYDNEY, N.S. — A young girl in a red jacket, faceless in her surgical mask, was an unsettling image for a former New Waterford resident to come across during a recent visit to Beijing, China.
With the coronavirus in full effect, streets normally filled with hundreds of thousands of people are largely deserted. Blair Boudreau and that girl on her bicycle were among the only people in sight on that Jan. 30 morning.
“My colleagues described it as the zombie apocalypse and it is a fairly accurate description,” said the 53-year-old flight attendant for an international airline.
“Through the silence all you can hear is this squeaky little bike and there’s this girl driving up … in the middle of nowhere without a word or a nod or anything. She just stopped at the lights when no traffic is coming in any direction. And then waits for the light to turn and then just continues on.”
Two streets over, Boudreau had just completed filming and snapping more images of a very quiet city he usually visits a few times a year. Normally, bicycle racks are empty as people use that mode of transportation to pedal through the city of more than 21 million. Intersections are usually flooded with cars, too.
Never in his life had he seen a city the size of Beijing — or any Asian city, for that matter — fall so silent.
“Something like Beijing, there’s constant sounds and constant sensory input,” he said.
“There’s also constant odours. There’s the smell of cooking food, the smell of rotting fish, the smell of garbage, the smell of animals. It is just constant.”
Beijing is a clean city, he said, but the aromas always evident during past visits were absent, as were the endless sounds of life usually all around him.
“It was remarkable, too, because I don’t know where the people went, if they had left for other villages or they were kind of sequestering themselves elsewhere. Even when you looked up into the towers there was no signs of life.”
Because of all the precautions in place, Boudreau said he felt quite safe being among the few people walking through the city that day.
Precautions mean hand-sanitizing is necessary before you can enter any building and there are devices in place to check your temperature before access to most places is allowed. Gloves and masks are also the law on public transportation.
That quiet day, he could find just one restaurant open that was catering to Westerners. There were no buffets allowed, though, and the menu items were few.
It was all as if a "beehive had gone silent," he said, and he was so fascinated by it all that he couldn’t help but document it.
“Had I had the foresight I would have rented a video camera and literally walked up the streets with a video camera filming empty streets for two hours and submitted it to TIFF (Toronto International Film Festival) or something.”
Boudreau’s family grew up on Acadia Street in New Waterford and once owned a hardware store in the town. His visit to Beijing is now over and he’s now back in Ontario.
“I told my mother after, of course, after I got back. I said "you know, I was glad that I had done it because it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity"to take a two-hour walk down the streets of Beijing, completely empty.”
