bezdomny ex patria

It’s not just heat that’s been on the way up recently, but water use, too. According to 北京晚报/Beijing Evening News, Beijing has set a new record for water supplied to the city. Twice. Well, a record for “so far this year”, followed by a “most ever”. But first, a clarification: This article is dated July 6, so where it says “yesterday”, it means July 5. It only showed up in my Kaixin001 feed this morning. Anyway, here’s the record setting:

市自来水集团介绍，在7月4日城区日供水量达268万立方米创出今年新高后，昨天市区日供水量达286万立方米，超过去年夏季278万立方米的历史最高日 供水量，也创出北京百年供水史上最高水平，已接近市区的日供水能力。统计数据显示，昨天高时供水量出现在9时到10时，1小时供水量达16.48万立方 米。

The municipal water supply group said that after the amount of water supplied to the urban area reached 2.68 million cubic metres on July 4, setting a new record for this year, yesterday the amount of water supplied to the city area reached 2.86 million cubic metres, breaking the historic record set last summer of 2.78 million cubic metres of water supplied in one day, setting the record for the largest amount supplied in Beijing’s 100-year history of mains water supply, approaching the maximum amount that can be supplied to the city. Statistics show that yesterday’s peak water use was betwen 9 and 10, with 164,800 cubic metres supplied in one hour.

[Yes, as always, I have played it a bit fast and loose with aspects of the translation. Corrections and improvements are welcome]

Apparently demand for water is so high that the water supply group is considering limiting water supply to certain industries for the duration.

Now, I’ve said it a million times before, and I’ll probably repeat it several million more times, but one of the things that worries me most about Beijing’s future is water:

北京连续十年干旱，虽然今年降水多于往年，但是密云水库的蓄水量反而低于往年。今天上午，密云水库的蓄水量为9.4亿立方米，比去年同期减少2.4亿立方 米。此前不久，来自河北三座水库的2亿立方米水，经过南水北调京石段工程持续进入北京。河北水抵达北京团城湖后，经过管道进入市自来水厂，加工过滤后进入 千家万户。市自来水集团称：“目前北京自来水管网中三分之一的水是河北用水。管道中的每一滴自来水都非常珍贵，希望市民要珍惜使用。”

After Beijing’s 10 years of continuous drought, although precipitation has been higher this year, the amount of water stored in the Miyun Reservoir is actually lower than in previous years. This morning, Miyun Reservoir held 940 million cubic metres of water, 240 million cubic metres less than at the same time last year. Not long ago, 200 million cubic metres of water from three reservoirs in Hebei entered Beijing via the Beijing-Shijiazhuang section of the South-North Water Diversion Project. After Hebei water reaches Beijing’s Tuancheng Hu, it is piped into a municipal water treatment plant, and then after treatment and filtering enters the city’s households. The municipal water supply group said, “Currently a third of the water in the city’s pipe network is from Hebei. Every drop of water in the pipes is very precious. We hope the citizens will cherish it.”

I certainly do not like the look of those numbers.

Anyways, that’s enough breakfast-time blogging and dodgy as hell translation. I do still have exam papers awaiting grades.

I’d finished my lesson prep so far as I could – one of those frustrating ones where you know what you want to do with the class, but you’re struggling to figure out how to put it all together – and I was sitting there, fidgeting, nameless, directionless, frustrated energy bubbling away just beneath the surface. I decided to get up and go for a walk and burn some of it off.

Get outside, bump into a colleague, chat for a bit. The sky was grey, the sun was sinking, nothing unusual. A few raindrops fell, and I said, well, I better go, meaning I’ve got to get some fresh air before the weather turns nasty and night falls. Out the gate, down the road, I was crossing the next intersection, a quarter of the way out into the road, looked back, and

SHIT!

Big, black, ugly, menacing cloud bearing down, the kind you see on one of those really disturbed summer days, days when the air is filled with tension that snaps into a violent squall that scours the city then disappears as quickly as it came, leaving the place beaten about, but calm. A slightly over-the-top description, perhaps, but if you remember the summers in Beijing between, say, 5 and 8 years ago, you’ll have seen more than a few of the squalls I’m referring to, and you’ll know that they can be as violent as they are sudden.

And so I crossed the road and continued on the route I had planned, thinking, I’ve got to get some exercise, and I’ve got to figure out what to do about this weather. And so I, zipped up my jacket, flipped on my hood, and continued, one eye on the weather, one eye on hazards, like our friendly, local high-tension powerline and on places to shelter should that cloud’s threat turn into reality. People were zipping around with extra urgency, hawkers quickly packing up their fruit and veges, everybody keen for shelter.

I stopped in the little Jingkelong about halfway along the weather-shortened version of my stroll (I had been thinking of adding another loop into the route, but that didn’t look like the best idea, having less potential shelter along the way), but they had no Yanjings in the fridge as they have for the last couple of weeks. So I walked to the shelf, and settled on splashing out on a couple of cans of Tiger – it’s no different from the rest, just a cooler-looking can and higher price, but might as well. I opened one can and put the other in my pocket, sipped and watched the weather. Wind and a bit of rain, not too bad, looks like we’re only copping the edge of the squall this time, might as well head for home.

A nothing story, but a reminder of the weather that is likely to come in the next few months. Last week I saw the first blossoms of the spring – ‘first’ meaning the first I’ve seen so far. It hasn’t quite sprung yet, but it’s certainly on its way.

Friday afternoon (Good Friday, it seems. I completely forgot) we jumped on the bus for Yanqing, came back yesterday evening. We had pretty sweet luck with the transport both ways, beating the holiday crowds both times. We got off the bus at Nancaiyuan close to six on Friday evening and got in a taxi straight away – for the first time ever, not needing to negotiate the price, the driver giving us the right price straight away. We headed up to where the road crosses the Gui River into the county town proper. There was still ice on the water. Patchy, thin, dangerous-looking, but still ice. And, of course, no blossoms that side of the Jundu Mountains.

Change of a different kind: The old cinema west of the bridge on the south bank where the main road crosses into the county town, a cinema that had been gutted for renovation last time I saw it, was standing there rebuilt in a style largely reminiscent of that of the new church on the north bank at the eastern end of the county town, a red brick modern style one would expect of perhaps the mid-90s where I come from, but with an odd dome poking out the top seeming to stubbornly keep the style of the old cinema. I don’t know what this building has become, but as we zipped past in the battered, old Xiali, it certainly looked like a church. Still, maybe it’s just a renovated cinema. Or something else.

The ice disappeared as we headed west, and the river was completely thawed by the time we reached the next bridge, less than a kilometre down the road, and crossed over to the north bank. A couple of blinks of the eye and we were back into countryside, and some farmers still finishing off the day’s work in the fields, some burning off stubble, others turning the earth over, others, maybe judging from the aroma, spreading manure, all preparing for the planting. In response to a question from my wife, our driver said, nah, won’t be planting corn till about the 20th. Preparing, at least, then.

So, yeah, it’s still cool up there. Not uncomfortably cold, even quite comfortably warm during the day if you’re out in the sun, but certainly still cool. Even had my brother in law not claimed the bed in the other room, we would still have been sleeping on the kang for the warmth, I’m sure. In fact, my brother in law still had an electric blanket on that bed.

Early starts, that means, earlier than if we’d managed to claim the bed. Sleeping on the kang means there’s no way you could roll over and go back to sleep. But it’s warm, and in the winter when the coal stove is going, warm enough it can have you sweating in even the coldest weather – so long as, of course, you stay on the kang and under the covers. That can make getting up in the morning a delicate negotiation between drying off and staying warm. But it’s warm.

…changed utterly…

…apologies to Mr Yeats. But ‘utterly’ is how much it had changed. No terrible beauties born, though,’least, not I saw.

Needing to walk off a load of overdue test marking (marking that had been done, I must emphasise, though I’m not sure I trust the elderly and increasingly doddery office computer to have kept a record), I wandered off out the South Gate and through the Twin Dragons, then south into what had been – what still was – the Hongyan Market. ‘Had been’ because when I lived in the Twin Dragons, indeed, right up until not so long ago, when I was last in the area, which can’t've been much more than three years back, the Hongyan Market was a large, but fairly typical for this area, local market. Nuffink special. Three or four large hangars, looking like the kind you’d expect around the edges of a World War 2 aerodrome in southern England circa the summer of 1940, but painted in bright blue and white and housing all the various fruits, veges, nuts, spices and sauces, meats, clothes, curtains, blankets, shoes, socks, sundry household necessities, whatever the local neighbourhood could need. These hangars were fed by a driveway of the kind of white concrete one sees on driveways and parking lots built cheaply and not expected to see much serious traffic. The driveway ran like a southward extension of Xidawang Lu.

And the driveway has become a southward extension of Xidawang Lu. The driveway must have been ripped up, rebedded and repaved, because that stretch of concrete is no longer there. Indeed, nothing is there, just a road extending much further south than any road I remember in that area. And the market? Completely uprooted and replaced, and not just replaced, but replaced by something that looks so established you wouldn’t know anything had changed if you hadn’t known the area as it was a mere four years ago. The only hints I had that I was in an area I should’ve known were the fact that I had walked there following roads I’ve known longer than I’ve known my wife and the buildings around the market area – buildings that I’ve known as long as those I’ve known those roads I mentioned. Had I been kidnapped, blindfolded, taken to the market, and prevented from seeing those familiar buildings, I would’ve had no way of knowing where I was.

And no, I am not just talking, “Oh, things change fast in China”, or even, “Things change so fast here that if you haven’t been back in a few years, you won’t know the place”. I’m talking, this market hasn’t changed at all. It’s been completely replaced, and a road pushed through, and a bus depot installed, and all of this done within the last three years and yet the market, road and bus depot that are there now look as though they’ve been there for ten years already.

And that’s what I can’t figure out. Is what I saw today the market that was always there, except that the facade has changed, and the changing of the facade has opened up areas of the market that were formerly obscured from the direction that I always entered? I don’t think so, because although there was always ‘stuff’ behind those hangars, there were never any intriguing little alleys, let alone giant signposted gates (both of which were in ample evidence on this afternoon’s visit) to entice one into a little exploration.

Except, of course, that I never saw any reason, or even any way, to explore beyond the old market. It was there, I wandered through it, I made what use of it I could. And now, no more than three years down the track, it isn’t just completely different, it is a completely different and far larger market sitting in the place occupied by the market I remember, but looking like it’s been there forever.

And walking out of there, I found myself wishing we still lived down in the Twin Dragons, close to this new market that wasn’t so new but is so much huger and comprehensiver than its predecessor.

And then I remembered my landlord when I lived in the Twin Dragons. Fortunately my wife never met him.

But it was nice to walk out of there and northwards into areas that haven’t changed, areas that exude that comfortable establishedness of neighbourhoods that have no reason to be questioned, and have no reason to doubt. Thence through an area that is being torn down, and yet survives, so far. Then back through established and safe neighbourhoods and home.

Still, this new-but-not-new market, I’ll be back there, and fairly soon, and often, if for no other reason than just to see.

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?

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.

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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It’s nice to be told straight up I’ll never get a mortgage because I’m a foreigner. And for my wife to be told she’ll never get a mortgage because she married a foreigner.

On Friday after work lzh met up with a friend. Her friend said, “Hey, there’s this real estate development out in Yanjiao (燕郊) that’s selling apartments cheap! You should come along and have a look!” And so they agreed to meet at the 930 bus stop at Dabeiyao (Guomao) at 11am.

Yesterday morning dawned with me feeling tired and headachy and generally not wanting to do much more than sleep. But I was kicked out of bed, thrown in the shower, dressed, and dragged out the door. Well, it wasn’t that bad, and it would be nice to see if these apartments were any good and if they were affordable.

The norwester had finally come and cleared out that ridiculous damp, snowy weather we’ve been plagued with for the first half of November. A clear, clean, blue sky, but a bitterly cold breeze. We got to Dabeiyao, met our friends, found the stop for the bus we needed (the 930, like apparently all the 900-series buses, seems to come in a wide variety of mutations, so we had to find one particular 930 that would drop us right outside this development), and eventually managed to get on one. There was quite a crowd of people looking to catch the exact same bus, so we watched three load up and leave before we made it to the front of the queue.

The bus was pretty good, taking off down the Jingtong Expressway then the Jingha Expressway, making a couple of stops along the northern edge of Tongzhou town before getting back on the Jingha, zipping past Songzhuang and across the Chaobai River, over the border into Hebei, then straight down the G102 through Yanjiao. It took us a little under an hour to get out there, and that was largely thanks to the lack of traffic restrictions on the weekends causing backups at the toll gates. Lack of traffic restrictions and the large number of real estate developments being built in Yanjiao. Although we were in Hebei, it seems most of the cars had Beijing licence plates, and the sales office of the development we visited was packed.

The Chaobai River wasn’t much of a river. More like a long, narrow, shallow ditch with a couple of tiny streams winding their way through, but otherwise mostly grass. It would be nice to think it turns into a proper river with the summer rains, but that grass was a bit too long for me to believe it had suddenly sprung up in that brief gap between summer and November when it was still warm enough for things to grow.

It seems that Yanjiao is taking advantage of its proximity to Beijing- especially the CBD- to drive its development. “40 minutes to the CBD” they told us, and considering it took us 50-odd minutes to get there through weekend unrestricted traffic, I can believe that’s true of a weekday morning. The most common kind of advertising along the G102 in Yanjiao was for real estate, and where Yanjiao was expanding at its western and eastern edges, there was no shortage of sales offices. Especially along its northwestern edge, apartment blocks seemed to be the most important cash crop of Yanjiao’s fields. Every bus stop- including Dabeiyao- seemed to have a huddle of real estate touts hawking apartments. I can’t understand why anybody would buy an apartment from somebody standing at a bus stop clutching a well-worn brochure, but I guess they must be able to make a living this way, otherwise they wouldn’t be standing out in that cold, cold wind. And glancing at the map, Yanjiao seems to be no further from Beijing’s CBD than Shijingshan, and closer than Shunyi or Changping.

Our destination was on the eastern edge of the town. The western edge was all fancy, new real estate, then the bus took us through the centre of town, which was considerably older and betrayed Yanjiao’s real status as a township of Sanhe City (三河市), and a small one at that, with a population of 104800 in 2002. The dusty streets were lined with weathered buildings from the white-tile period of modern Chinese architecture, other buildings with very-faux-Classical European facades. It felt very much like a small county town, but not as far along in its development as any of Beijing’s equivalent outlying towns. Nevertheless, it seemed like quite a pleasant place, and certainly had all the amenities one would need in order to persuade people to buy apartments out there, plenty of restaurants, supermarkets, markets, hospitals and schools.

We arrived at our destination on the eastern edge of the town. The first thing I noticed when we got off the bus was the cooling towers of a powerstation just fifty-odd metres northeast of this development. Steam from the towers conveniently obscured the chimney and its smoke, but I’d noticed this powerstation in the distance when we were driving through the town. I was told it would soon be closed down. I have no way to confirm that. Anyway, right in front of us was a fancy new towerblock, obviously yet to be completed. Well, the structure was all there and people had moved in to their apartments, but the lower levels that were supposed to house a shopping mall were still in use as the sales office. So, finsihed, but not quite. Immediately to the west was Phase 2 of the development, where are friends are planning to buy a small apartment. On the eastern side was an old, 1950s-looking estate of long, low-rise brick apartment blocks that would soon have to make way for Phase 3. To the south was an area of low-level industrial buildings, little more than a shanty town.

Inside the soon-to-be-mall/sales office, the walls of the lobby were covered in posters showing the various kinds of apartments on offer and sofas arranged around coffee tables at which multitudes were doing their deals. Under the escalator was a large model showing the finished project, a model that showed the effects of the myriad people with an urgent need to touch it in order to figure out what it will be like when it’s finished. This place was beyond crowded, and the thousands of small groups of apartment hunters and buyers acted with such urgency you’d think they were running late and in danger of missing their train. Our friends found their agent we had a look around. Our friends were there to book an apartment, that is, to put down a 10 thousand yuan non-refundable booking fee which would get them an apartment set aside for a week, a week in which they had to find the deposit and get a mortgage. We were there to have a look and see if it was worth booking an apartment for my brother-in-law, and perhaps, if possible, ourselves, something I was not overly happy about- apartments are not the kind of thing one buys on impulse- but that’s what we were there for.

The apartments seemed fine. Indeed, we did get to look at two in the completed Phase 1, and we certainly could not see anything wrong with them. We would, of course, have trouble getting a mortgage, but we were told there were ways and means around that. My brother-in-law doesn’t have that mortgage problem, though. What was frustrating is that we could put the deposit down, we certainly do have the money, but a large portion of that money can not be touched until lzh has a visa for New Zealand in her hands. If we so much as glance at it before then, NZ Immigration will deny her the visa. A couple of quick calls, and no, we can’t make up that shortfall that isn’t a shortfall but is borrowing money from friends. We’d be able to get some, but not enough. In any case, now is not a good time for us to be buying an apartment, we have other plans. But we did pay the booking fee on a small apartment for my brother-in-law, and I hope he comes up with the deposit by Friday, I don’t want to lose that 10 thousand yuan.

We arrived at midday, and the process of discussions, looking around, urgent phonecalls  to various people, more discussions, more phonecalls, paperwork, and handing over money took quite some time. It was almost 5 when we got back to Beijing, starving. Yoshinoya rescued us, and then I snuck off to O’Farrells to wind down while lzh phoned her father and her brother to discuss the rapid rounding up of money for the deposit on her brothers’ apartment that now needs to be done.

And the norwester continues to blow, keeping the sky clean, clear and blue. lzh is sitting a translation exam. I’m starting to think about lunch.

And so today is 立冬, the start of winter. After a week of obssessively bleeding radiators to try and encourage hot water to come through the pipes, only for cold water to drip out, we seem to have some heat.

Well, not so much “heat” as “not cold”. Still, it’s enough that the temperature inside our apartment climbed to 17 degrees last night, and 18 degrees by the time I got up this morning. It’s amazing how much of a difference those precious few degrees of warmth make. Waking up to 15 degrees was chilly, prompting me to crank up the aircon so we could start the day warm. Going to bed at 16 degrees had us shivering and huddling together to try and get warm. And as our radiators get less and less “not cold” and more and more “actually quite warm”, perhaps the situation will continue to improve.

But based on last winter’s experience, another cold snap will have us back down to 16 degrees pretty quickly.

Waking up, I looked at my cellphone. Twentysomething past six. Surely not, it’s still pitch dark outside! I snuck a peak out the window. Aha:

Lack of wind + the city’s central heating boilers firing up (many of which still burn coal) = ever thickening haze.

Understood. The sky did slowly, weakly lighten as the sun tried to penetrate the haze.

Curious: Yesterday saw a veritable torrent of hits to this blog coming from one particular American IP address. These hits are listed as “feeds” and have lead to an utterly absurd spike in the stats. The IP address in question seems to be connected to this page, which I can’t open (indeed, other links from what seems to be the site’s main page also behave as if they’re GFW’d). The torrent seems to be continuing this morning. I can’t see anything objectionable about that site, I’m just kinda curious as to what is causing this sudden surge in the stats.