bezdomny ex patria

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.

All Saints’ Day. I wake up a bit after 7, properly awake, no way to get back to sleep, so I get up. My wife was still sleeping, so I left her in peace, wandered in to the lounge room, open the curtains, and

SNOW!

It’s snowing! I knew it had suddenly got cold yesterday, but yesterday was dry, clear blue sky, and I didn’t realised it had suddenly gotten that cold. And snow on November 1, isn’t that a little early?

So I fire up the computer and start brewing tea. I sign into Kaixin001 and see Guoan won the championship, Chen Lin is dead, and a video of a Chinese guy (Sun somebody) who plays football in England making a most impressive save, sprinting back and getting a foot to the ball just in time to prevent the goal.

lzh woke up and asked if it was raining. No, I say. Don’t lie, she says. Go look for yourself. Snow! But Ma and Ba haven’t sold the apples yet! Will snow freeze the apples? I don’t know. So she phones home and her dad says it’s only sleeting up in Yanqing. That I do not understand. Yanqing is colder than Beijing. If it’s snowing here, how could it only be sleeting up there?

And then I learn a new word. lzh is still much perturbed by the snow, and asks maybe if it’s some kind of 冤情. What? 冤情. Yeah, but what’s that? Eventually I get an answer, and she tells me a legend of some guy who died in June, and so it snowed, apparently the snow being Heaven’s tears. Fine, but what does 冤情 (yuānqíng) mean? Nciku says it’s “Facts of an injustice”, while CNKI says simply “grievance”. The dead tree dictionary next to me agrees with Nciku.

And what’s this legend? I try searching Baidu Baike. No luck. Baidu Guoxue. Still none. Well, I’d only just started looking when lzh says she’ll find me the story, and here it is on Baidu Zhidao. And that rankles. My students know from long and repeated experience that if they ever suggest Baidu Zhidao as a possible means of researching their essay topics, I will immediately respond 百度什么都不知道 (Baidu knows nothing)! Oh well, at least I can read the story, now, assuming of course that the answer Baidu flags as best is accurate. Anyway, it’s the story of a young woman who was unjustly executed, and as a result, it snowed in June. Something like that.

And I learn another new word: 昭雪 – to exonerate or rehabilitate. Interesting.

Meanwhile, the snow changes from the usual Beijing-style tiny little flakes to gigantic, fluffy snow, and the paths, which still had too much heat for the snow to settle on them, seem to have cooled enough to allow the snow to start piling up there, too. The usual low rumble of buses passing along Xidawang Lu is only a faint whisper.

新京报/The Beijing News reports on an interesting little development in Beijing’s central heating: Contracts. TBN’s Du Ding reports:

“供热合同”出台 供暖不达标将向市民赔偿

“Heating contract” promulgated. Citizens to be compensated if heating not up to standard.

北京今年出台“供热合同”，明年试行，今冬供暖11月7日点火试运行

Beijing promulgates “heating contract” this year, to be trialled next year, this winter heating to be lit November 7 for trial operation.

今后供暖期，供热单位将和市民签订“供热合同”，昨天，北京市市政市容管理委员会供热办主任郭维圻做客“首都之窗”时表示，为保障供热双方利益，今年北京将出台“供热合同”，明年试行并推广。内容包括供热企业达不到合同规定标准，将给市民赔偿等。

In the upcoming heating period heating companies will sign a “heating contract” with citizens. Beijing Municipal Cityscape Management Committee Heating Office chairman Guo Weiqi said yesterday as a guest on eBeijing (English) that in order to guarantee the interests of both parties, this year Beijing will promulgate a “heating contract” to be tested and promoted next year. The contents will include a requirement for heating companies to compensate citizens if they don’t reach the required standard.

今年出台“供热合同”

“Heating contract” promulgated this year

每年供暖期，都会发生部分市民、单位因嫌供热单位供热不到位而拒交供热费；一些供暖企业因收不到供暖费便降低供热质量。郭维圻表示，针对此问题，北京市 将通过立法的形式加以规范和完善，“立法过程中就要建立合同制度。”据介绍，该“供热合同”将由市民与供暖单位签订，如果供热企业达不到合同规定的标准， 将会给予市民相应的赔偿等。

In every year’s heating period there are some citizens and units that feel the heat supplied by heating companies is not up to standard and so refuse to pay the heating bill; some heating companies, because they don’t receive heating fees, lower the quality of heating. Guo Weiqi said that, with this problem in mind, Beijing would set standards and perfect the system through a legislative form. “We need to establish a contractual system in the legislative process.” It is said that this “heating contract” will be signed by citizens and heating companies, and that if heating companies don’t meet the standards stipulated in the contract, they will have to appropriately compensate citizens.

62357575供暖热线将开通

Heating hotline 62357575 opened

[eliding a paragraph- I don't think we need a rundown on how much gas and coal is ready to be burned to keep us warm]

李楠表示，全市各个供热应急抢修队伍11月7日开始实行24小时值班。另外，从11月7日起将向社会开通市级供热服务热线：62357575。各区县政府大型供热企业和单位，也要同时对社会公布服务电话。

Li Nan [note: a member of the Beijing Municipal Cityscape Management Committee] said that all the city’s heating emergency repair teams would start implementing 24 hour duty from November 7. Also, from November 7 a city-level heating service hotline, 62357575, would be opened to the public. Every district and county government’s large-scale heating company will also need to publicly announce a service phone number at the same time.

Notes:

• 北京市市政市容管理委员会- well, I found their website easily enough, but I couldn’t figure out why, although their address (bjmac!) was clearly based on an English name, no English name was apparent, even if only in tiny type in the logo. So I just made up a name, and I think “cityscape” sounds way cooler than “Municipal Appearance Committee” or whatever it’s supposed to be.
• 北京市 将通过立法的形式加以规范和完善- I wound up just having to mangle that. If anybody has better suggestions, comment.
• I used “heating company” for every word referring to any kind of organisation responsible for supplying heat for simplicity’s sake.
• Yeah, I know, that last sentence I translated uglily.

Anyway, it’s good to know there’s likely to be hot water running through our radiators from November 7 and that they’re working to set and improve heating standards. Last winter our apartment hovered around the 15/16 degree mark on the coldest days and it was occasionally necessary to crank up the aircon.

So as midday approached and my stomach grew insistent I started thinking, well, I haven’t been to the barbeque restaurant recently. The somewhat controlled tumble downstairs met me with a colleague, who was also hungry, and planning to meet another colleague in 10 minutes outside. And so I sat in the garden waiting. Then a neighbour, girl of 7 or 8 came out looking for our puppy, and, on being told that we’d taken the puppy up to the village, decided to practice long jump. The first colleague came back downstairs, followed by a third and a fourth (we were waiting for the one who has a slightly different understanding of “10 minutes”), and so this rather small neighbour decided to play with us games involving string wrapped around fingers. Eventually the one we were waiting for appeared, and so I and three colleagues (the third was on his way somewhere, but the fourth we managed to ensnare) headed off to our friendly, neighbourhood dead-things-on-sticks-roasted-over-charcoal restaurant, leaving the small neighbour with her mother who had conveniently arrived just as we were heading off for lunch.

And so there was lunch. It involved, as you’ve probably guessed, various dead things skewered on thin sticks and roasted over charcoal. It was good. But they all had things to rush off to, one to the airport and two in search of clothing to ward off the menacingly increasing cold. That left me in a state I quite enjoy: Staring out the window at the passings by.

The restaurant is down a lane a short walk north of our estate. It’s a lane marked by a hotel at its eastern end, a hotel built over what was a very stinky canal not too many years ago, but whose extent west of Xidawang Lu was encased in a tunnel, and a hotel which houses, along its northern side, the restaurant in which I was sitting. Beyond the hotel are a few restaurants in what should be temporary accomodation- those kitset buildings build around a steel framwork with steel/polystyrene/steel walls used for workers’ housing on construction sites or temporary refuge in disaster zones. Then there’s a construction site, a low-rise building going up on what has been mostly waste land for quite some time. That’s followed by a patch of land going to waste largely because of the low-slung high-tension power line that crosses it, followed by apartment buildings built any time between the 1950s and the 1990s- nothing new, and all very well established neighbourhoods.

Along the north side of the lane is all apartment blocks, largely the same as those along the western extent of the southern side of the lane, punctuated by that high-tension power line and a primary school.

But I sat in the restaurant just a few metres in from the eastern end of the lane looking northwards onto two housing estates. The nearest was the oldest, and of an age that is hard to guess. It could be anywhere from 15 to 50 years old, judging by the style, although I would guess closer to 15. No bricks were in evidence, but I would assume that’s because the bricks had been coated with cement and then painted. I’ve never been able to tell if they intended the buildings to be a faded pink with white trim or white with a faded pink trim. Most windows on the first, second and third floors, and many on higher floors, of course, were covered in steel cages intended to keep burglars out. Most first floor residents had, naturally, enclosed a bit of extra space as some kind of yard or an extra room, with the residents of one apartment having claimed quite a large area behind a concrete wall with jerry-rigged looking windows and a slapdash asbestos tile roof held in place by pieces of brick. In the neighbouring building one resident family, having found themselves on the end of the building, had put an outside door in the side of their “extra” room and an old armchair next to that door, where grandpa spent the time I sat staring out the restaurant window sitting and observing the passing world.

Two floors above that extra large “extra” room was what I first thought to be a balcony craftily converted into a pigeon coop that allowed the birds a certain freedom of movement and room for exercise. A second look showed it wasn’t a balcony, but one of those anti-burglar cages custom made to give about twice as much space between window and bar with a sheet or two of plywood laid across the bottom. A wooden box had been place at one end to give the pigeons a nesting space, but the pigeons had room to flit about within the cage. I presume there was a door to let them out to fly around in the open sky, as most urban Beijing pigeon coops have, but from my angle I couldn’t see it.

The restaurant is directly opposite what seems to be the main entrance to that faded pink/white estate. There are no major gates to it on Xidawang Lu, just one big enough to allow cars, but with wrought iron gates permanently closed to all but pedestrian traffic. On the north side is a very new housing development, and along the west is a lane just as small as the one running along the southern side, which took me to and from the restaurant, but considerably more isolated from the bigger roads.

Pedestrians, cars, bicycles, tricycles, and scooters both electric and two-stroke petrol came and went for reasons personal and commercial. A white VW Jetta with Henan licence plates entered. Last I heard, cars registered outside Beijing needed a special permit to enter the capital. I don’t know how that works or how that is obtained, but I can understand people resident in Beijing registering cars in Hebei or Tianjin, obtaining that permit, and driving here. But surely Henan is a bit far away for that to be practical? But then again, I regularly see a car with Guangdong plates parked on the side of the next lane south of there.

That new development immediately north of the faded pink/white complex I have watched grow from the hole-in-the-ground phase to basically complete. Last time I went past its northern face it was still a construction site, but one in the final stages of finishing off and polishing up. Judging by the number of curtained windows and aircon units on balconies I saw today, they must be very well into the process of delivering units to buyers. But whereas this faded pink/white 5-storey complex immediately to its south looks organic, like an established community, the new complex looks modern, tan, sterile, and clinical. I guess it takes time for a development to become a community.