bezdomny ex patria

It’s an odd little article, this, desperately short on detail. When I read this:

The Gold Coast Bulletin reported today that Smeltz had decided it would be impossible for wife Nikki and his two children to settle in Jinan, 400km south of Beijing.

I’m wondering, well, why? What’s the problem? Although I could certainly understand that from the point of view of maintaining good relations, not unnecessarily burning any bridges, and just generally being polite, the Smeltz family would not necessarily want to announce to the world exactly why they decided they couldn’t settle in Jinan.

And then I got to wondering how Chinese media reports would frame this (if they even reported it). First result in a Baidu sports news search was this, which starts out with:

在山东鲁能和新西兰前 锋斯梅尔茨完成签约后，在当地时间7月17日早晨，澳大利亚的《黄金海岸报》惊曝 斯梅尔茨因为不适应在中国的生活，欲取消转会重回老东家黄金海岸。

After completing the signing of the contract between New Zealand striker Smeltz and Shandong Luneng, on the morning of July 17 local time, Australia’s Gold Coast Bulletin suddenly revealed that because Smeltz couldn’t adapt to life in China, he wanted to go back to his old boss Gold Coast.

And later adds this:

报道中称斯梅尔茨的太太尼基和两个孩子对中国的生活条件不太满意，对于未来在济南的生活没有信心，这是促成斯梅尔茨改变决定的根本原因。

The report said that Smeltz’s wife Nikki and two children were not very satisfied with China’s living conditions and had no confidence in their future lives in Jinan. This is the basic reason bringing Smeltz to change his mind.

A tiny little bit more detail, but nothing we couldn’t have inferred from the Stuff article I linked to first. So what does the original Gold Coast Bulletin article say? Baidu can’t find it and Google is behaving suspiciously again, and neither Stuff nor Netease seems to have the courtesy to link to the original,  so I’ll have to try some other way to find it…. Yahoo! Australia, perhaps…. Ah, here we are:

The New Zealand international decided after just five days in China that it would be impossible for wife Nikki and his two children to settle in Jinan, a sprawling metropolis 400km south of Beijing.

And that’s it. Rather sparse compared to Netease’s extra (although still rather vague) detail.

In any case, it seems there’s nothing Shandong Luneng can do about it, as although a contract had been signed and money had changed hands, a certain piece of paperwork had not been filed, and so the transfer had not been completed.

And the next question, of course, is: Five days?! Is that all? Is Jinan that rough? Or perhaps more likely: Was the shock that big? Oh well, as a person I knew way back in Taiyuan put it: China’s not for everybody. The Smeltz family are hardly the only foreigners who have been unable to adapt to life in China.

And it’s not all bad for Shandong Luneng. Netease adds in its report that they’ve also signed the South African defender Matthew Booth. Let’s hope for their sake that transfer goes a little more smoothly.

Apparently Smeltz’s time at Shandong Luneng could be the shortest transfer in football history. But I’m wondering, if the paperwork was not completed, does it count? Did the transfer ever occur?

It’s also interesting that Netease adds that Smeltz, who set an A-League record of 19 goals last season, received many offers, but mostly from clubs in lesser leagues in Asia and Europe. That detail seems to be missing from the Stuff and Gold Coast Bulletin reports.

It would seem that this is the first time ever I’ve written anything about football. I don’t normally pay too much attention to sport, but I do generally watch as much of the football World Cup as possible. That’s the only way I recognised the name Smeltz in the headline.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Mr Ji is calling for help.

Now, I personally know very little about the Overseas Chinese Education Foundation. It looks like a good cause, though, so I’d say it’s worth, at the very least, checking out. If you like what you see, you have access to Facebook, and you can spare $10 (I’m assuming thats US$), then help them out. Pop on over to the Ji Village News (link at the top of this post) for the details.

Ten years ago today I first arrived in China. Well, that’s not entirely accurate. October 20, 1999, I flew into Hong Kong, where I spent one night and one day, before heading back out to the airport to meet up with my colleagues and hop on our flight to Changsha. But Hong Kong was a mere stopover (sorry, Hong Kong). Arrival was the evening of October 21, in Changsha.

I suppose I should have something profound to say about my experiences over the last decade, but I don’t. Nor do I have anything interesting to say about the changes I’ve seen in China over the years. Sorry. I do have to say that, as milestoney as it is, it actually seems like a very short time. And indeed, a mere decade it is.

One of my students said, wah, you must’ve looked really young back then. Yeah, and how about you? Oh, I was just a little girl. Yep, one thing that makes me feel old is that my students were in primary school when I first arrived here.

But there you go, a decade.

‘Twasn’t much of a weekend, at least not for me. For me, it could’ve been spent more productively. A short translation, sure, but then mostly just hanging out with colleagues or sitting at home alone watching DVDs for as long as my eyes would stay open.

For my wife, on the other hand, the weekend involved getting up close and personal with more apple trees than she would care to remember. Her parents phoned in a panic looking for help getting their apples in, as everybody else in the village had picked theirs, and they couldn’t leave the apples out too long, and maybe somebody would try to steal the apples if they didn’t get on with it. lzh got back to Beijing on Monday morning utterly exhausted and aching all over.

Incidentally, if anybody in or near Beijing is looking to buy a large amount of apples and is willing to drive out to Yanqing County to collect them, leave a comment….

But as gloriously unproductive as my weekend may have been (I was going to spend it marking homework, but decided to change that plan to going over things in class with the students face-to-face- seemed to fit my philosophy for this semester better that way), it was marked by a rather disgusting discovery on our stairway. I won’t go into any detail at all. It wasn’t just the discovery, but the culprit’s (I hope it was the culprit) pathetic and rather late attempt to clean up followed by the even longer delay in (even more hopefully) the culprit removing the remaining detritus, that has left me still trying to shed the last vomitous smears of disgust. I am still careful traversing a certain section of our stairwell- careful as to where I tred and what I think, smell, and see, even though I know it is now cleaned.

This morning on the way to the office to pick up necessities from class I noticed smoke. Well, first off, somebody in the slum over the wall from our estate often burns things in his yard, and the last few days seems to have been rather more active than usual. But I got over to the main campus and turned south and there was a smudge against the grey sky, a smudge that from its texture seemed to be something more local than the background smog haze. Squinting at it, I saw that it was smoke coming from the stack of the central heating plant that last winter apparently produced some “black snow“. No sign of snow, of any colour, of course, I was still to far away for that. But it was encouraging to see. Very soon it will be cold.

And a notice has been posted to say the heating supply will be tested in our neighbourhood on Thursday morning. Another good sign. We’ll be needing that very soon.

The one thing I really do not like about the winter is waking up in darkness. That combined with poor sleep has not helped this week start well. Finally this afternoon a much delayed trip to the tea shop happened. It has been too many days since I woke up with a nice, hot, bitter cup of longjing. Far too many. That limp, mediocre Laoshan green tea I picked up in Qingdao was alright for dumping in my flask to get me through classes, but no good for that early-morning jump-start. Half-rate jasmine tea is just as good for the flask, but even worse for starting the day with.

And so after class I stopped off at the office to talk over a few minor administrative issues, then feeling a little tired and headachy, trundled off to the south gate then along Shuanglong Lu, crossing Xidawang Lu then continuing just a few dozen metres west down Songyu Nan Lu to my local branch of Wuyutai (吴裕泰茶庄).

I love that shop. It’s not just the tea fragrance that surrounds when you step through the door, either. Only once have they not had the tea I requested- and that was a rather obscure request. Oh, sure, I would never expect them to have anything other than Chinese teas, so it’s not like I asked for a Darjeeling or Irish Breakfast. And yes, I have on occasion had to adjust my price range to suit what was available at that point in time. But those are minor issues. They always have what I want at close to, or usually exactly the price I want to pay. And the staff, that’s what makes that place: The staff are superb, friendly, polite and efficient, all of those qualities done almost, but stopping just mercifully short of, a fault. I don’t need to walk so far to buy tea, but I do, every time, and for very good reason. I love that shop.

Then a quick stop in the neighbouring Shouhang supermarket for a couple of breakfast necessities, a stop made extra quick by my awareness of how grumpy I was feeling, then home, but not the direct route straight up Xidawang Lu. I took the opportunity to wander along an almost-but-not-quite-as direct route through a part of town I hadn’t visited for a while.

Nothing had changed. But then again, nothing (apart from the muster of foreign teachers at BeiGongDa) changes in this part of town, not since the new real estate developments along the southern side of Songyu Nan Lu were finished. Out of Shouhang I continued west, those new apartment blocks ahead on the left, then turned right and walked north through the older streets, surrounded by apartment blocks that look to be fifty years old. Narrow streets, narrower footpaths, businesses that, apart from one or two restaurants, haven’t changed at all since I first wandered these lanes back when people were more worried about SARS than swine flu. Established communities, very well established, judging by the how hard it looks to find a parking space in that area. It was good to see everybody out on the street in the afternoon warmth and calmer breeze after Sunday evening’s rapid shuffle through a howling, frigid norwester down a desolate and near-abandoned lane a couple of hundred metres north of there.

Various random vendors worked off a blanket on the side of the footpath or a bicycle or tricycle parked in one of the few gaps on the side of the road. At the Post Office corner a man was pointedly asking a pedicab driver about the sound suspiciously like pedicab scraping (poorly) parked car while the pedicab driver protested, “I’ve been watching my pedicab! You think I’d let it hit your car?!” These dry norwesters must be getting to some people. A dozen metres further a woman’s shrill voice screached out in protest at some other impropriety. Two chengguan (city inspectors? uniformed thugs?) lounged about the bicycle park. Another dozen metres and the footpath became an annex of the local market, one of several markets within an easy walk of home that sells just about everything, with vendors working off blankets spread on the ground, flatbed tricycles, light trucks, the backs of vans, anything that was useful. Autumn’s overflowing abundance.

Then the intersection, a relatively new one, one I remember in it’s muddy, confusing state before that still rather barren extension of Songyu Bei Lu was pushed through to Xidawang Lu. I briefly considered continuing north up the street a former colleague named Stinky- a lane, really, with at its southern entrance a public toilet rebuilt only a year or so ago into something less pungent, but still blessed with a garbage collection station just north of that toilet that continues to produce a foul stench and makes one very careful, through it’s colourful leakage, about where one steps in the summer when one is wearing sandals. It’s not a street that fully deserves its name, despite the still very foul garbage collection station. It’s an odd mix of slum and apartment blocks, the slum being, so far as I can tell, the remnants of the original village converted to urban use. Urban, but not rich. Still, it’s a community that, despite a certain smelly issue at its southern end, that I have always felt comfortable in.

But no, not while I’m carrying groceries. The walls around our complex would render such a detour twice as long as it needed to be, and while I would not normally be averse to that, having done it on many occasion, I was well aware of my grumpiness. And so I opted for the boring, but shorter route, turning right to meet up with our friendly local high-tension power line as it crossed from the northern to the southern side of Songyu Bei Lu before heading out east, bisecting our campus.

And so ends another day. At least I have some decent tea for tomorrow. Tomorrow is, after all, a big day, four straight classes. And a big day in another way, too, something that may need to wait till Thursday for an explanation.

We were standing by the side of the old G110 highway at about half past two yesterday afternoon waiting for a bus into the county town. It was actually quite chilly; the weather was grey and damp and the temperature hadn’t risen terribly much since sunrise. I’d seen two buses heading up the road to Xiaying, but Ma insisted three had gone by. I guess she’d seen one pass as we were walking down the village lane to the highway and I’d been looking elsewhere. Xiaying is a fair distance up from our village, and with traffic, who knew how long we’d have to wait?

A convoy of ambulances came up the highway, heading northwestwards, new, they must’ve been, with no licence plates, about a dozen of them. Along the sides was painted “中国妇女发展基金会” – China Women’s Development Foundation. Across the front, “田家健康快车”- at least, that’s how I remember it. Both Google and Baidu are swapping 母亲 for 田家 in their first few results. To be honest, I can’t be arsed with more than a cursory search right now. Nor can I be arsed finding out if there’s an official English translation. “Rural health express” would be my first assumption, but 田家 means a farming family, so maybe “Rural families’ health express”.

Yes, I could easily find out what these ambulances are about. Google and Baidu have turned up a number of articles on the ‘母亲’ version of these ‘健康快车’, but as I was standing there on the side of the highway, cold, with my pack on my back waiting for the bus, I was thinking, hey, cool, they must be headed for northwestern Hebei where they’ll be like some kind of mobile clinic providing basic health care to rural families. But assumptions are easy. Based on where I was standing, the lack of licence plates on the ambulances, and the highway they were travelling up, the could’ve been headed for northwestern Hebei, northern Shanxi, southern Inner Mongolia, or…… And to do what, exactly? ‘Mobile clinic’ is a nice idea, but I just don’t know. Still, it was an encouraging sight.

And then after about half an hour of standing under the trees that line the highway a bus finally came on its way back from Xiaying into the county town. Jam packed. Sardine can packed. Ma said, forget it, we saw three go up, there’ll be another bus along soon, and that’ll have space. Normally by this time I’m thinking, whatever, just get into the county town, but Ma said, no, wait. And sure enough another bus came within ten minutes, and with seats still spare. Sweet as. We piled on, we got seats, and off we went, me staring out the window as is my wont.

I was surprised to see at the entrance to a road running up the side of the next village down two large concrete blocks not blocking the road, but giving drivers serious reason to slow down, and two women in red armbands sitting on chairs on the side of the road. Geez, this village’s committee was taking National Day security seriously. But several other village lanes and side roads had, if not concrete blocks, one or two red armbands standing around watching. I suppose I should’nt be surprised, I mean, the same is still happening down here in Beijing, but I can’t see how there’d be any kind of security threat over this holiday out in those villages. Just farmers going about the harvest and their children coming back from the city for the holiday, surely.

And then at the base of the Shijinglong skifield the highway hooks a right, swinging round to the south for the run into the county town. Just down from Shijinglong what had been a construction site last time I came down that road in early August was now a giant “生态园”- ecological garden. But given that it was dominated by a huge cavern of a building made almost entirely from glass with the plants inside arranged in very pleasant order, I’m guessing it’s the kind of place that hosts numerous wedding banquets every weekend. A little further down was a more traditionally Chinese-style courtyard of a certain order of magnificence taking shape.

The highway ducked under the new G110- the highway built specifically to keep heavy trucks out of regular traffic- and the Dalian-Qinhuangdao railway, and then the electronic voice announced that the next stop was “Yanqing Fuochezhan”. Yeah, I almost missed our stop because of what came out the speakers as a more typically southern (Hunan, and a few other areas) subsitution of ‘f’ for ‘h’, but I caught myself in plenty of time, wrangled the pack over to the door, made sure lzh was with me, and all was good.

I don’t know how permanent the move of the 919 bus terminal to this lot next to Yanqing Railway Station is, but there’s a building going up there, and there seems to be a lot more space for the herding and storage of buses there than at the old bus station. Even so, it’s still, at this stage at least, a very temporary-looking affair, the concrete on the ground looking like it was very quickly poured, the railings to marshall the queue looking to have been installed on the run, and the street-side walled off with those blue steel panels used to wall off construction sites. The public toilet just outside the bus station was your typical, rural-style, rough-and-ready, brickwalled concrete panels over a rather short (and rapidly filling) drop. Not the most disgusting public toilet I’ve ever had to use, but not far off- one of those places your very careful where you step right from the moment you walk in the door. Nevertheless, the 919 Yanqing-Beijing route was functioning as efficiently as it usually does (and as efficiently as it wasn’t on September 30 when we headed out to Yanqing), and it wasn’t too long before we were on a bus back into Beijing.

We got on the bus and it ambled its way over the roughly-paved square and out onto the road, heading south down the road that skirts the eastern edge of the county town. Just before we reached the Gui River we were stopped at a red light and a building to our right caught my attention. I couldn’t see from that angle what kind of building it was, but its shape seemed oddly familiar- which should not be the case considering I’d never visited that corner of the county town before. But there was something about it…. Apart from its dark brown colour it could’ve been the church in the wedding scene in The Graduate, or either of the churches in the Wayne’s World 2 pisstake of the wedding scene in The Graduate. And so as the light turned green and we rumbled off, I made sure I could see as much of this building as possible, and sure enough, it was a church, a very new church, and one its sign made sure was an official protestant church.

I’d heard about this church a couple of years ago. lzh told me some kind of church had been built somewhere in the county town, but she didn’t know if it was protestant or catholic, and didn’t know where it had been built. But there it was, through some fortuitous change in bus route. And it was a pretty decent size, too, not like those piddly little churches you get in Beijing at Zhushikou or halfway between Xidan and Xisi, a tiny fraction of the size their actual congregation needs.

Heck, last time I was at that church between Xidan and Xisi (I can’t remember the actual name of the place) about 40% of the congregation was in the main church hall and another 40% in a side hall and 20% in the courtyard, the latter two groups following proceedings via CCTV. But that’s beside the point.

On the way into Yanqing on September 30 we passed by the old 中心市场/Central Market. A long time ago it was closed down then torn down. Then a gigantic hole was dug, then work was begun on some fancy new commercial centre. I have no idea what the new place is like, all I know is that when we zipped by, twice, it was open, finally. I have no idea what it’s like, having just zipped by the gates twice within the space of 15 minutes, but there it was, finaly open.

Every time I go out to Yanqing there’s a change, and despite the occasional temporary step backwards- a backwards step generally necessary to allow the subsequent step forward- the changes are for the most part positive. The only exception I can see is transport within the county, which stubbornly remains at the barely adequate level, but that’s ok, it’s only that trip from the village into the county town that’s occasionally difficult. Otherwise, what I’m seeing out there is positive, real improvements.