bezdomny ex patria

It was one of those slightly disconcerting descents when all you can see is solid grey murk outside. They’re not the worst approaches to airports, I don’t think. Approaching a coastal airport after dark from the ocean end is worse, when all you can see outside is pitch darkness right until you’ve crossed the airport perimeter is worse. Done that into both Wellington and Hong Kong before. Freaky. The worst solid grey murk approach I’ve had was into Hong Kong when the odd, fuzzy shapes in the grey turned out to be ships – the murk had reached the point where there was no visible difference between sky, sea and air.

But today, after some seriously disconcerting shapes of shadows in the murk, we popped out below the cloud – and I breathed a sigh of relief to see that we were not already below treetop height (that’s what the shadows looked like for a bit – tree tops). And there was Beijing spread out in all its glory – glory dimmed by the solid overcast, but the air reasonably decent for that late in an overcast afternoon, with good visibility right into the central city.

We landed on the runway east of T3. We were bound for T2, meaning we had to cross another runway. I hate it when they do that, land aircraft on runways that require them to cross other runways to get to their terminal. It doesn’t help that I find the taxi from runway to terminal the most frustrating part of a flight. After all those hours in squished into an aluminuim can breathing increasingly skanky recycled air, we’re on the ground again at last – can’t we just be there?! But childish impatience aside, we got off the plane quickly enough, and through customs in record time. Back in Beijing.

I don’t want to complain, because it is good to be back in our apartment, but having spent most of the last two weeks based in the Waikato with side trips to Auckland and Rotorua, and the remainder in Wellington, it is a bit of a shock to the system to get back to the greybrown of a wintry north China, especially with snow that started to fall exactly as I climbed in the taxi at the airport.

Emerald Isle? Ireland can’t've been that good if my ancestors packed up and left. Early mornings looking across the gently rolling, deep green of the Waikato as the sun rose golden over the other side of Hamilton were simply magic. Those Wellington mornings, when we were staying in old family friends’ bach (pronounced ‘batch’, meaning ‘holiday home’, traditionally built out of whatever was available, these days often pretty nice; also called a ‘crib’ south of the Waitaki River) in Waikanae, walking barefoot out the backdoor and straight on to the beach, Kapiti Island a few short kilometres offshore, the sun rising over the ranges behind, the ragged northern ends of the South Island more often than not lurking in the southwestern distance.

It felt good.

And there’s much more to write, but that’ll have to wait for now.

And so we’re preparing to celebrate the advent of the year of the tiger down here in Chaoyang District. It’s the first time my wife has spent the Chinese New Year away from home, the first time I’ve spent it in downtown Beijing since fireworks were allowed back within the Fifth Ring Road. We’ve hung our 福 characters and couplets and set off a role of firecrackers for that. lzh has most of the food ready waiting for friends to come and help her wrap jiaozi. Our supplies are ready for the evening, and friends promise more on the way. I have more firecrackers waiting for midnight.

And then we get up early tomorrow morning to head for the airport and catch our flight to Auckland. I’m guessing that between fireworks and the early start, we’ll be doing most of our sleeping on the plane.

Bad news from home means the first week of our trip is going to be rather more sombre than we were hoping. The timing could be worse, though, as this time round we get to be there without having to scramble around looking for last minute flights, seeing as we were planning on being there anyway. And it will be interesting to see how lzh copes with being surrounded by my mother’s rather large family. Grandma will be leaving behind seven children and…. I can’t remember how many grandchildren and greatgrandchildren. A lot, anyway. Still, it’s going to be far from a good start to the Tiger Year.

So we’re all packed up except for that last minute stuff. A taxi has been booked so we don’t have to take our chances. Tomorrow just short of midday our plane takes off, and 13 hours later we’ll be in Aotearoa – the first time in seven years for me, the first time ever for my wife.

Assuming anybody still reads this blog: Happy new year to you all!

There’s a simple, tactile, olfactory pleasure in spending a morning in bed with a good book unaware of the passage of time except by the turning of pages. There’s a comforting surprise in seeing just how many hours have slipped by.

Equally to strolling with no greater aim than to burn off a little energy and get a little exercise and fresh air.

And to the exploration of things new, even if it’s nothing more new than the new quarters of a long-standing neighbourhood market.

I’ve watched that new market being built from our loungeroom window and balcony for the last couple of months, it being 20 metres south of our place as the crow flies (but of course, there’s an inconvenient wall in between), occasionally wondering what this new structure would become. It gradually came to look more and more like a new indoor market, but I couldn’t be sure. Eventually, bright yellow, almost but not quite orange, wall panels were fixed to the steel frame, windows were inserted, a roof put on, and work shifted to the interior with the sole exception of two signs announcing that this, indeed, would be a new market. The market it would replace, whose name it had taken, which sits diagonally across the road about 50 metres away, the one that had been threatened with being replaced by a hospital. This time around they had the new market almost completed before the old one was closed.

I don’t know what this presages for the old market. When I walked past it today, as last time, the gates were firmly locked and peeking through the gaps revealed a wasteland. The old structures, those thin, steel frames that supported the thin, steel rooves that sheltered the stalls from the sun, rain and snow, were gone, leaving an empty, forlorn space strewn with rubbish and the little bits of rubble not worth removing. There was no indication that I could see of what this wasteland would become.

But the new market looked good. Nothing fancy, but functional and clean. At one end was a gate with two middle-aged men bearing red armbands proclaiming them to be safety inspectors, or something like that, who formed the nuclei of nebulous and ever-changing groups of friends and acquaintances stopping for a chat. Inside, a paved courtyard expanding to the left, where a bicycle park had been establised, with the market building and its entrances to the right. Along the southern wall of the courtyard immediately left of the gate was a small building in three compartments: A women’s toilet, men’s toilet, and the “standard scale” (公平秤). Inside, the building felt either spacious or as if they’d spaced the stalls out wider than normal, I’m not sure which. It’s not a large building, but the spacing of the rows of stalls made it feel somewhat Tardis-like.

The northern and southern walls were lined by mostly butcher, seafood and delicatessen stalls, with a few selling various assortments of spices, sauces, nuts, beans, grains, sweets, and one selling various alcohols I won’t even venture to name (that being far too deep into traditional Chinese alcohol culture for my mediocre knowledge) out of large earthenware vats, interspersed mostly at corners and in odd niches. The centre was widely-spaced rows of stalls selling mostly fresh fruit and vegetables. Tall stalks of sugarcane stood at one stall, and….

….was that taro I saw sitting on that counter?! Taro I have not seen for many a long year.

Upstairs was clothing, shoes, and all the various odds and ends required to run a household. Up there quite a few of the stalls were closed – the owners having gone home for the holiday, perhaps? – and two or three were still unoccupied. Clothing seemed to dominate, but there were more than a few stalls set up to cater to the neighbourhood’s Spring Festival needs – all but the fireworks – and several ranging from brushes and brooms and those other little necessities up to hardware like tools, low-end electrical goods like lightbulbs, plugs, cables, multiboxes, various plumbing necessities like taps and their components, and even one selling rangehoods and the various bits of pipe, duct, and tubing needed to get the smoke and grease of a Chinese kitchen outside.

In other words, it was exactly the old market shifted into a new building. And yet it seems somehow smaller. Did all of the market shift, or did some give up and move elsewhere?

I was going to write this a few hours earlier, but I suddenly lost all internet contact with New Zealand… again.

Today is Waitangi Day, the anniversary of the signing between Britain and most Maori iwi and hapu of the Treaty of Waitangi, making New Zealand a British colony. The Treaty is traditionally seen as New Zealand’s founding document. We don’t have an independence day, we have a dependence day.

And next weekend my wife and I will be boarding a jet plane and flying to New Zealand. It’ll be her first trip ever outside China and my first time back to New Zealand in seven years. I’m kinda curious to see how both of us will react. I have to admit to both being a bit nervous and looking forward to it. Although I’m certainly not looking forward to being stuck in a tin can breathing recycled air all the way from Beijing to Auckland…. Sure, direct flights have their advantages, but there are distances over which it is nice to take a break. But ticket prices made a stop in Hong Kong on the way there uneconomical. Oh well, we get a stop in Hong Kong on the way back.

I’m not going to even attempt to explain the prolonged silence on this blog, except that I’ve felt the need to withdraw a bit. Two posts have been started but not finished, and therefore not posted, over the last few weeks. I won’t promise to update in the next week, and I can all but guarantee a lack of updates during the two weeks we’re in New Zealand. I do hope to get back to business as usual in March.

Well, I was almost tempted to weigh in on the Great Google Melodrama, but Mr Bamboo saved me the trouble by writing pretty much what I wanted to write in this concise paragraph:

Another entry raises a question about Google censoring certain search terms and functioning within the law. If Google.cn ceases to censor search terms, then isn’t it breaking the law? Thus Google can’t negotiate because it can’t somehow be exempt from the same laws which apply to everyone else. Like any other government, the boys in Zhongnanhai aren’t about to concede anything.

Exactly.

And will everybody please just calm down? Google is not the internet. Baidu is not the only alternative. Any hypothetical shutdown of all Google services from inside the Mainland would be a pain in the arse, but is in no way equivalent to Mars colliding with Earth and the Sun exploding. This will all blow over and we’ll go on to have a 2010 with many more things to overreact to.

That said, I am a little concerned at the possible advent of the Great Chinese Intranet….

This evening is one of those evenings I’m glad it was my wife who made the decision. Had it been up to me or my father in law, we’d still be in Yanqing watching the snow fall and wondering if we’d make it back to Beijing in time for lzh to get to work the day after tomorrow. But she insisted we leave this afternoon, pointing out that the last bus leaves at 6pm (actually, 7pm, if by “last bus” she was referring to the last 919 from the county town into Beijing. Of course, 6pm may well be the time the last bus leaves either our village or the terminus further up the road, the last village before Hebei, and therefore our last chance to get into the county town). And let’s face it, so long as we first get on a bus for Beijing, and secondly get across the Jundushan before the weather turns bad, it really doesn’t matter how late we leave.

This morning started with one of those utterly pathetically light snowfalls that north China occasionally turns on. A few flakes fall, enough for you to know it’s snowing… kinda… not enough to do anything useful, like make a snowman, or even a snowant with, hardly enough to make a snowamoeba. But enough to let you know it’s snowing… kinda. It wasn’t long before the sky cleared and I was scoffing at the accuracy of CCTV 1’s 7:30pm weather report again.

It was a late kind of a day. We were all rather slow to leave the warmth of the kang. Breakfast eventually came more towards lunch- than brunchtime. Jiaozi were promised for lunch, and of course, there were the shrimp bought in the county town the day before. By the time they were all cooked, it was almost 4pm. Both myself and my father in law were getting rather reluctant for lzh and I to leave. I mean, this late…. why not just wait till tomorrow. “What if there’s snow?” she said. “The weather’s good now, but it’s supposed to change.” I quickly got online via my cellphone to check the forecast. Alright, fair point, there’s a decent-sized snowfall predicted for tomorrow, which, if it materialises, will probably close the roads over the Jundushan, stranding us in Yanqing. No big deal from my point of view. I don’t have an exam till the 5th, and therefore had an extra day to get back. But she’s got to get back to work the day after tomorrow, so getting stuck a dozen kilometres north of the Great Wall when her office is dozens of kilometres south of the Great Wall probably isn’t the best idea.

So after a lunch too late to be lunch, not quite early enough to be dinner, we quickly packed, rugged up, and walked down to the highway. By this stage the sun was already very low in the southwest, filtered red through the remaining cloud, and it was more than a little chilly by the side of the road. Fellow villagers also waiting for the bus into the county town told us not bad news: They’d been there a while already and had seen two buses heading upwards, so it wouldn’t be long before one came back. About ten minutes, which these days, since the introduction of public transport swipe cards killed off the miandi business, is pretty good. A largely empty bus, it was, too, which is a rare sight out there these days indeed. We got seats, even. Turns out, it was the bus whose terminus is at the other end of the village, and the late hour meant relatively few people competing for the far too few buses into the county town. But largely empty, and old, meant cold and drafty.

And after a few months at a temporary location by the county railway station, the county bus station has moved back to its original location. That’s not a bad thing, but it does mean that the short walk down and across the road after getting off the 920 into the county town to get the 919 into Beijing has reverted back to getting off the 920 at the closest bus stop, then hiring a banche – a flatbed tricycle good for hauling goods and people – for a short hop across to the county bus station. Not bad, but after a cold and drafty half-hour bus ride, certainly not warm. I spent most of that short portion of the  journey burrowing my face down into the upper limits of my scarf in an attempt – successful, as it turns out – to stop my lips, cheeks and chin from shattering in the cold.

My father in law assures me it’s been an unusually cold winter so far. My mother in law agrees. I’ll take their word for it, considering they’ve spent almost their entire 50-some years on this planet in Yanqing or (in the case of Ma’s early years) Huailai. And I can’t think of any New Year’s Day I’ve spent up there that I’ve sat on the warmest part of the kang (the part right next to the stove) for half an hour and have still been shivering.

Anyways, after the ritual pitstop across the road from the bus station, we joined the queue. A rather short queue, mercifully. And even more mercifully, they were loading two buses at a time, despite the lack of people. And not just loading two buses at a time, but bringing buses out of the depot instead of relying on refilling buses from Beijing. That and the strange people who won’t get on a bus if their ideal seats are taken meant we were on a nice, warm bus quick smart.

Too warm, perhaps. Warm enough to make me sleepy, and yet I couldn’t sleep. And it being about a quarter to six when we got on the bus, it was the first time I’ve crossed the Jundushan after dark, which made it a rather boring journey. Usually I manage to fall asleep as we cross the mountains, only to wake up just in time to be bored to tears as we cross the plain through Changping. This time I managed to be awake-but-sleepy through the whole journey, but with nothing to look at. The first signs of the morning’s snow came at the safety check at the top of the mountain, where the wide bus park and weighstation left enough space for snow to have settled, and streetlights made is visible. Otherwise the mountain portion of the trip was darkness to left and right with mostly a red glow in front from brake lights.

Yes, brake lights rather than tail lights. The morning’s snow, as I had expected based on my only other trip across those mountains after a snowfall, had made everybody a lot more cautious. The red glow of brake lights was only broken by the flashing blue and red of policecar lights at a couple of accidents, orange from a couple of signs, and the occasional flash of white light as we passed some mountain village’s houses.

Maybe my imagination was primed by my re-reading of Lao She’s Camel Xiangzi, but the journey, especially as we passed through what I’m told is Asia’s longest road tunnel (although I have no idea how accurate that claim may be), seemed as interminable as Camel Xiangzi’s flight with three camels from military conscription. Sure, he was fleeing from the southwest, whereas we were on a peaceful bus from the northwest, and his flight was marked by pitch darkness, whereas our trip through said tunnel was marked by featureless orange light, followed by a ride down a nighttime highway, but it seemed to take so much longer than normal. It can’t have, though, because we got home a little after 8pm. That would seem to me to be slightly, but not significantly, longer than usual. Still, the bus felt somehow slow.

Getting off the bus at Madian, we hoofed it for the best corner of the interchange to get a taxi home, as usual. Somehow we managed to get a driver who lives nearby our place, but who didn’t want to go home just yet, as he hadn’t made his day’s rental – ah, yes, what novel did I just decide to reread? In any case, he got us home in good time, thanks in part to the sweetest traffic I’ve seen in a long time, and mostly to his good driving. At Madian we’d seen evidence that it had also snowed here in Beijing this morning, or at least (as the taxi driver confirmed) last night, but it wasn’t until we got close to home in southern Chaoyang that we saw evidence of a decent snowfall. There wasn’t a large amount of snow around as the cab pulled into our estate, but there was certainly a lot more than we’d seen this morning, enough to suggest that there had been a pretty good snowfall.

And then, having gotten inside our apartment and, as per ritual, divested ourselves of our baggage and plugged in the water heater – the two first tasks to be performed when we get back from the village – lzh phoned her father to let him know we’d gotten home safely – ritual number three. “It’s big snow up here”, he said. Well, good thing I listened to lzh and we headed back when we did.

Or perhaps that should be Three Shots. I certainly think Three Shots would be a better English title than the official one. Still, I guess the official English title contains a reference to the films inspiration.

I was standing on the corner of that big, fancy mall on the northwest corner of the Shuangjing intersection waiting for my wife to finish sifting through overpriced clothes so we could go watch the film. I knew which of the buildings around me were old and which new- indeed, I remember when the spot I was standing on was a fancyarse lawn scarred with pathways leading into the sales office for the complex which was then little more than a hole in the ground. But somehow all the buildings looked the same age, as if the norwester had finally put the upstart new buildings in their place. It seems we have a habit of going to the cinema on blustery, dry, cold December days to see the latest blockbuster. Indeed, last time we’d gone to the cinema was almost exactly a year ago (indeed, we’re ony 3 days short), and the coldest December day in Beijing since 1951. That day we saw Feng Xiaogang’s 《非诚勿扰》. This time, when lzh emerged from the clothes shop, we wandered up to… oh, no “Wait, we’ve still got time, let’s go check out those discounted shoes first, you need new sandals for when we go to New Zealand”. grrrr. And it wasn’t any kind of shoes we bought, but a new pair of thick longjohns for me, me having discovered unfortunately late yesterday afternoon (when I really needed to be getting out of barbeque-reeking clothes and making myself respectable as presentable as possible) that the top half of my other set of thick longjohns was MIA. And then back to the cinema to see Zhang Yimou’s latest film, 《三枪拍案惊奇》/A Simple Noodle Story.

I have a love/hate/like/why can’t he get back to realising his full talent? relationship with Lao Zhang. I love his early work. I hate his martial arts epics. 《千里走单骑》/Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles was good, but not as good as his early films. 《三枪》 I don’t yet know how to rate.

I suppose I should note that the version we saw at UME Shuangjing was Mandarin soundtrack (obviously) with Chinese subtitles. Those whose Chinese is not up to following a film entirely in Chinese should either look for a cinema showing it with English subtitles or a DVD with more subtitling options than the cinema allows.

First impression was that the volume knobs on UME Shuangjing’s amplifiers must have a Number 11, because the three shots that bring the opening credits to a close really were one louder. Or to put it slightly more directly: If those three shots hit you with such force that you wonder if somebody hasn’t just put three bullets in your forehead, then perhaps somebody should turn the volume down just a tad. lzh spent most of the film with fingers firmly planted in ears, and yet didn’t miss a line.

Based on what I’d seen on TV, I went in expecting some form of comedy, probably of the rather silly kind, some Lao Zhang’ed cinematic errenzhuan [that is perhaps the worst wikipedia stub I've ever seen, but at least it gives you a brief description], perhaps. I also did not have high hopes from the film, having heard that it wasn’t all that good. Second impression was that the expectation the TV promotional stuff had given me was right, but the comedy was good. I certainly would never have expected to see 饼 (Chinese pancake type thing) given the same treatment as one of those errenzhuan kerchiefs and spun around till it became a pizza base so huge it’d have the Kro’s Nest pizza chef putting three shots into his own head for shame. It was a lot of fun to watch, but at the same time not a total surprise considering that 3 of the 4 actors playing the noodle restaurant staff (Xiao Shenyang, Mao Mao, Cheng Ye, with Yan Ni the only exception) came up through Zhao Benshan’s errenzhuan circle.

Third impression was that this was most certainly a Zhang Yimou film. Only Lao Zhang could possibly make a desert look so incredibly lush.

There’s also something incredibly discordant about this film. It’s set somewhere way out in Northwest China along the Silk Road, but most of the actors spend most of the film in costumes more appropriate for an errenzhuan stage in Liaoning. Was a time when Lao Zhang was making Northwestern films with distinctly Northwestern vibes, but if you closed your eyes and listened only to the dialogue, you’d think this one was set somewhere on the black earth of the Northeast. Anachronisms litter the script like drug dealers on the streets of Sanlitun of a weekend evening. And I couldn’t help but feel those anachronisms hid a lot of knitting needle jabs at modern Chinese society.

Before too long, a certain darkness crept into the film. It acquired an undertone and atmospherics so black you’d swear it was filmed by a Kiwi. Lao Zhang’s lusciously filmed desert turned all gothic, with ever-passing stormclouds looming, threatening. Sun Honglei’s soldier turned into a psychopath who did everything possible to empty the noodle restaurant boss’ safe. Yan Ni’s 老板娘/Boss’ Wife was so keen to buy the Persian Merchant’s gun because she had suffered ten years of horrific abuse at the hands of the Boss (Ni Dahong). And the Boss is quite a piece of work: Abusive, with a penchant for cutting the fat baby’s face out of New Year paintings and forcing his wife to put her face in the hole as he quietly, calmly tells her off, then slams burning tobacco into the small of her back. Self-centred, manipulative, and tighter than a Scotsman’s arse. While the errenzhuan actors seem to spend most of the film on the errenzhuan level of comedy, Yan Ni’s Boss’ Wife takes a wild, bipolar ride between brave face, slapstick comedy, and Greek tragedy, with Xiao Shenyang’s Li Si desperately trying to figure out what’s going on and how he’s supposed to respond to it all. But can this 娘们唧唧的/Big Girl’s Blouse man up and John Wayne their way out of this mess?

All three shots in the gun sold by the Persian Merchant are put to very good use, with the second being sidesplittingly, laundryman’s-going-to-be-busy hillarious. But I’ll say no more than that the Boss’ Wife gets what she needs, but at a cost of Shakespearian proportion.

Beware, within this beautifully-filmed, light-hearted comedy are hidden a myriad of ragged shards of glass. But it’s a great film. Watch it.

Oh, and for the “Some People Are Just Too Damn Talented For Their Own Good” file: Xiao Shenyang sings the song that animates the final credits (the first of his songs which is not a pisstake of other singers?), a song in which all the dead bodies come back to life and join in the dance. It isn’t just that Xiao Shenyang can act errenzhuan and more widespread forms of drama, and sing and dance (uh… errenzhuan), but Sun Honglei also turns out to be a pretty decent dancer.

Yesterday at lunch with my colleagues the spookiness of coincidences was mentioned. How’s this for spooky coincidence: An Air France Airbus A330 flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris on November 29 met the exact same meteorological conditions in the same region as the Air France A330 that crashed into the Atlantic Ocean on June 1. Here’s Le Monde’s article with my dodgy translation:

Le 29 novembre, un vol Rio-Paris a rencontré des conditions similaires à celles de l’avion qui s’est écrasé en juin. C’est une information que révèle Le Figaro. Il y a dix jours, le vol AF 445, qui est le nouveau nom donné au vol AF 447 d’Air France depuis l’accident du 1^er juin dernier qui avait fait deux cent vingt-huit victimes, a subi de fortes perturbations exactement dans la même zone que celle où l’AF 447 a disparu.

November 29 a Rio-Paris flight met similar conditions to that of the plane that crashed in June. This information was revealed by Le Figaro. 10 days ago, the flight AF 445, which is the new name given to Air France’s flight AF 447 since the accident of last June 1 that killed 228, suffered severe turbulence exactly in the same zone as that where AF 447 disappeared.

Faute d’avoir récupéré les boîtes noires, toujours au fond de l’Atlantique, les enquêteurs attendent de pouvoir analyser les données du vol AF 445. Le bureau d’enquêtes et d’analyses (BEA) en charge de l’investigation sur le drame a aussitôt lancé une enquête.

As they failed to recover the black boxes, which are still at the bottom of the Atlantic, investigators are waiting to be able to analyse the data from flight AF 445. The Bureau d’enquêtes et d’analyses (BEA) in charge of the investigation into the case has also launched an inquiry.

Le parallélisme entre l’accident du 1^er juin et l’incident du 29 novembre est saisissant, note le quotidien. Le vol AF 445 aurait rencontré des conditions météo perturbées dans le “pot au noir” (zone de convergence intertropicale) proches de celles de l’AF 447. Il s’agit également de la même famille d’avion : un Airbus A 330-203 pour l’AF 447 et un A 330-200 pour le vol 445. L’incident aurait eu lieu à 18 kilomètres de la zone supposée de disparition de l’AF 447, la nuit aussi. En revanche, l’AF 445 n’a pas subi de givrage de ses sondes Pitot et de pertes d’informations anémométriques, à la différence du vol AF 447.

The parallels between the accident of June 1 and the incident of November 29 are astounding, the daily noted. Flight AF445 met disturbed weather conditions in the “pot au noir” (Intertropical Convergence Zone) similar to those that AF 447 encountered. Both planes were of the same family: an Airbus A330-203 for AF 447 and an A330-200 for flight 445. The incident occured 18 kilometres from the zone from which it is assumed AF 447 disappeared, also at night. On the other hand, the pitot tubes of AF 445 didn’t frost over, nor did it lose its airspeed data, unlike flight AF 447.

Well, I think I’ve got the right meaning across. I should note that a French-French dictionary is not as useful for French-English translation as I first thought. Trouble is, I have yet to come across a decent online French dictionary. I would like to know, if there are any sailors out there familiar with the tropics, if there is any English language sailor slang equivalent to “pot au noir”. I should also note that I have never seen an English translation of Bureau d’enquêtes et d’analyses- and it’s been in the news a fair bit recently, what with Air France’s crash and the crash of an Air New Zealand A320 into the Mediterranean off Perpignan.

Anyway, it’s strange to see a flight from the same airline, the same kind of plane, encounter the same weather in almost the same spot as where one plane was downed not so long ago. And if what I just read about the Intertropical Convergence Zone is accurate, then I have to wonder just how many other similar incidents there have been in similar areas.

That was quick. After my unfortunate discovery on Tuesday afternoon, I got up this morning, showered and put the kettle on and all that, walked into the study and turned the computer on, and thought, that’s odd….

I could hear banging, crashing and crumbling sounds. I looked out the window. Nothing going on in our yard. Looked over to the left, and there it was: Workers on the rooves of those condemned houses, tearing off tiles, planks and beams and dropping them into the houses, smashing at brickwork with sledgehammers. So there is to be no reprieve.

Yes, I have been rather silent of late. I’ve been busy and distracted. I have large and growing piles of tests and essays to be marked. The piles of essays will continue to grow, and are even threatening to take over the office and start a whole new civilisation of their own. I will continue to be mostly rather silent as I take on these hordes of marauding essays and beat them back so that my colleagues and I can continue to use our office unmolested.

What inspires this brief break in the silence is the walk home from the supermarket this afternoon. After class I headed down to the nearest branch of Shouhang hoping to take advantage of the specials they have on. No luck. What I wanted was sold out. I guess I’ll have to try again Thursday or Friday morning closer to opening time. On the way home I decided to take a slight detour, walking up through the area just west of our complex and stopping by the newsagents for cellphone card and, perhaps, a copy of So Rock! if the latest edition was out yet. Again, no luck. Managed the cellphone card, but not the magazine. But a luckless shopping trip is not the point.

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