distant ruminations

I am a sick man. I am a headachy man.

Bellyachy, too.

In class this morning I had to send a student off to the shop to get me something to settle my stomach. He came back with a cup of some kind of orange drink. Boiled. Sickly sweet, but it did the trick and helped me get through the rest of the lesson.

Sorry for the terrible opening line.

Such a lazy day…. This morning’s class was cancelled because the students wanted to attend a lecture by the “leader” [so the students described him] of Cisco systems. So I took the chance to start the day at a more leisurely pace than normal. It felt necessary.

After class, though, a trip to the bank became necessary. I was supposed to do that yesterday, but I didn’t feel like pedalling my bike all that way through that strong, cold, dry wind. Pathetic, I know- I’m from Wellington. Yesterday’s wind only counts as a mild breeze where I grew up. But there you go, I was just feeling run down and looking for an excuse to avoid the bank. I hate banks.

I especially hate that Bank of Communications deposit machines are set so super-sensitive that they reject notes just because they’re getting a bit old. The old notes pass every other test of their genuineness, but the machine doesn’t want them. It means that I never manage to deposit my entire salary like I’m supposed to.

Yes, I know, the obvious answer is to ask the boss to deposit my salary directly into my account. I’ve been meaning to arrange that for months now.

Anyway, the second spectacularly clear, blue day in a row is drawing to a close. A pity such brilliant weather has to come with strong, dry, cold winds, but the air is clean and clear, and that’s the main thing.

And looking out the window, I get that same little tinge of jealousy as I do every morning. The setting sun is glinting off the southern faces of the highrises over by Wusheng Lu. They look so warm. Lucky bastards. The only sun we’ll be getting in this apartment until the Spring Equinox is what gets reflected off those buildings. The aircon is doing a reasonably good job of keeping the place warm, though. Well, so far, anyway- we’ve only needed it the last couple of days as the temperature has gotten properly cool instead of just a wee bit nippy.

There’s a lot of construction going on in the BeiGongDa campus, mostly along the southern edge. In the southwest corner a hotel is being built- it’ll have four stars when it’s finished, according to my boss. It’s hard to tell right now with only one star- the basic structure- nearing completion. There’s some similarly sized, similar looking building going up to the east of that, on the other side of the South Gate, just west of the Olympic badminton stadium. I have no idea what that will be.

And then this afternoon on the way to the bank, I heard this odd whirring noise coming from that southern strip of the campus. I thought it must be the cranes, of course, but China’s national bird, the construction crane (Beijingus skylinea) has a fairly distinctive call, and this whirring wasn’t quite right. I looked up and there was a helicopter flying around between these tall (not quite highrise, but not exactly short, either) construction sites and cranes. One of these, perhaps- although if you scroll down to the black and white picture labelled Chinese Z-9, you might get a slightly more accurate photo. [sometimes my childhood fascination with all things that fly- especially those that shoot stuff- comes in handy] It’s not often you see helicopters around Beijing. In my experience they’re more common in the outer suburbs- Tongzhou would occasionally have flocks of military helicopters flying around, and in that summer I spent working in Changping, I often saw a helicopter flying around. “Flying around” is the key- they always seem to fly in large circles. Anyway, there was this helicopter flying amongst the buildings and cranes. Actually, it was an amazingly quiet helicopter. I don’t think I’ve ever seen heard a helicopter so quiet before. It was so quiet it took me several minutes to connect this faint, high-pitched whirring sound with the helicopter, even though there were no other helicopter sounds hanging around to confuse the issue.

Well, if I had to guess, I would say the helicopter was carrying a photographer who was taking photographs or perhaps video (funnily enough) for some kind of promotional work. Promotional work for either BeiGongDa or the Olympics- they were flying very close to the Olympic badminton stadium, after all.

In other words, a perfectly normal day in which nothing happened worth writing about.

I did the one class I was left with after this morning’s cancellation, I went to the bank and deposited most of my salary (and yes, I could have deposited it all if I’d gone to the teller and done things the old fashioned way instead of using the machine, but I hate banks, and using the machine means I’m in and out with minimum pain in the shortest possible time), I went to the market and….

Oh, yeah, I saw Doctor Huang again. This time she satisfied herself with a simple “Ni hao, you came back” [Chinese small talk- her “you came back” statement was no more significant than the “how’s it going?” you ask a neighbour you know only by sight] and I was not encouraged to buy medicine or haws lest the inside of my head be swallowed by the world’s largest aneurysm. I hadn’t seen her for several days, so I was beginning to wonder if the chengguan had got her and confiscated all her medicine.

Her medicine, by the way, cures absolutely everything. Or so her leaflets claim.

I really should be marking assignments. This is taking too long. Trouble is, four classes of thirty-something, pushing fourty students each, and most of the students really are not up to university-level English writing…. Well, they are IT majors, so I can’t blame them, but still, marking their assignments is a painful experience.

Anyway, this morning I told the students: Here’s your topic: A wife for the family and a mistress for pleasure. Now, write an introduction for this essay. One student got up and said:

A wife is like food. When you’re hungry, you miss her. A mistress is like a bomb, one day it might explode.

In the midst of all this painful marking, it feels so good to hear a student come up with something creative, clever and witty. So beautifully good.

It’s not often I get memed. In fact, it’s almost never, meaning this is the second time in well over three years of blogging that I can remember being memed, but anyway, I got memed sometime over the weekend. I’m supposed to put up a screenshot of my desktop, but:

1. I’m not entirely sure how to go about doing that; and
2. The computer I usually use, the one the university provides in every foreign teacher’s apartment, is getting less and less reliable, and so I don’t really want to go provoking it any more than necessary. As it is, quite a few regular, normal, everyday functions have led to all kinds of ridiculous trouble. I’ve done everything I can to fix it, but nothing really improves.

Anyway, Stuart memed me, and I’m supposed to put up a screenshot of my desktop, but I don’t really want to risk the manic, senile wrath of this computer, and I’m too lazy to open up my much more stable laptop, so I’ll just give you a description.

First up, my desktop isn’t as clean and tidy as Stuart’s. First of all, there is no sleek, elegantly simple background. We’ve just left the wallpaper set to what it was when we moved in- some random picture of some random atoll, quite possibly in the South Pacific, but considering it looks like the free stuff that comes bundled in with Windows, it’s probably in the Caribbean. The laptop wallpaper is rather more personal- a photo of lzh on the seashore in Dalian- at the point on the western side of the mouth of Laohutan bay if I remember rightly. Secondly, I’m a messy person, one of those who works most effectively in merry chaos. My desktop- on both computers- is a mess of icons for various bits and pieces of software- including, on this computer, rubbish other people installed that I haven’t gotten around to removing yet (I discovered the hard way that removing other people’s software will not make this computer function better, although it will stop Tencent Traveller from deciding it must be the default browser and opening itself up without my permission), and folders containing various bits and pieces I’ve downloaded or written or photographed or whatever, and then various photos and documents I havent’ gotten around to putting in the folders I created for them yet. Anyway, my desktop is a mess. Much like the physical desk this screen is sitting on. Much like the desk I had commandeered in the office- until that desk was commandeered for the two new computers the boss bought for us foreign teachers.

Anyway, I guess I’m supposed to tag five people, but I’ve already broken one meme rule by not posting the required screenshot, so, umm, the first five people who read this? The first five who leave a comment (Stuart excluded, because he’s already done this meme)?

Sorry, a bit too worn out and traffic-jammed to cooperate with this meme thing properly.

Traffic-jammed?

Well.

Never has it taken us so absurdly long to get back from Yanqing. Well, there was one Spring Festival when we were snowed in for a day, but the next day we made it in to the county town even though the nobody had made even the slightest attempt to clear the highway, and by the time we got there the buses were back on, so we got back in the usual time, just a day later than planned. Doesn’t count, that one.

It started at the Yanqing bus station, where the queue for the fast buses stretched out the back gate of the bus station and around to the front gate. I have never seen such a long queue there, and I doubt lzh has, either. The queue for the slow buses was not short, either. Well, of course, Sunday afternoon, there’s going to be a lot of Yanqingren heading back into Beijing for the next week’s work or study. But the queue got so big because the buses just weren’t coming in to the station. I don’t know why. Normally there’s plenty of buses sitting in the station ready to go, and more coming in, so no matter how busy it gets, you never have to wait very long. And Bafangda bus company has proven itself pretty damn good at keeping up with the crowds. We’ve never had to wait long, no matter how long the queue, no matter how big the holiday or how many tourists there may be, because Bafangda always has enough buses running frequently enough that even a queue of one or two hundred metres will take at most half an hour to get through- and such queues happen at the start of major holidays at Deshengmen, when buses direct to Yanqing are filled as soon as they open their doors, while the Badaling buses struggle to fill up. So I assume it was traffic or some other unforeseen problem, the kind you can’t prepare for, that was holding the buses up. After all, they still seem to be stopping and checking every single truck heading northwestwards on G110 at the Yanqing weigh station, or whatever it is they’ve been doing to cause a permanent truck jam stretching from the county town back to the end of the Badaling Expressway. I fully approve of cracking down on the cowboys who make travel along the G110 so “exciting” at times, but… that’s the subject for a whole other rant. Anyway, we eventually got on a bus, and all was good….

Until we ran into a traffic jam stretching from just south of Changping Town all the way in to Madian.

And then another along the northeast corner of the Third Ring. And slow traffic down the East Third Ring.

We left the village about half past two. We finally got home just after seven. Four and a half hours. Not even in the days when lzh insisted on taking the slow bus- the one that stops at every little excuse for a village along the side of the expressway through Changping- did it ever take so long to get between Beijing and the village.

Anyway, it was a good trip. We took a few things up to the village, most importantly the big wedding photo album (we got two identical albums, one big, one small. It makes sense to leave the big one, which is really quite heavy, up in the village- lzh’s parents have a much more stable life than we do). It’s funny, everbody says I look good in those photos. Ma said I look much better in a suit than in my regular clothes. I dunno, I think at best I look alright. Anyway, if everybody likes the photos, cool, that’s the most important bit.

And we came back with a pack full of the rest of our winter clothes. Well, not all of our winter clothes, but certainly enough that we won’t freeze as the weather cools down.

And speaking of cooling down, I would say it was pretty close to zero degrees this morning up in Yanqing. Not quite cold enough for ice to appear, but still, very chilly.

But this morning dawned so brilliantly, amazingly, breathtakingly clear that looking out over the fields, I could’ve just about fooled myself I was back in New Zealand’s South Island. It was incredible. At about eight I walked outside and felt the chill, but I was too interested in getting to the toilet- and then on the way back from the toilet, I looked around, and….. brilliant. Cold, hard, blue sky and every detail of the mountains just north of the village etched so clearly and finely it could’ve been the landscape in Lord of the Rings, and a nearly full moon hanging low over Songshan to the northwest. Then I looked around- the last of the clouds were still making their way over the Jundushan towards Beijing, but the air was perfectly clear. A while later I stepped out of the courtyard to get a broader view- something that is much easier to do now that pretty much everything, and certainly all the corn, has been harvested. Incredible. Not for the first time I could see the mountains in the Badaling area. For the first time I could see past the Shijinglong skifield all the way to the mountains on the eastern edge of the basin- and those eastern mountains looked for all the world like the had a decent coating of snow on them. I was not the only one to think this- on the way in to the county town this afternoon, I heard lzh, Ma and Eryi discussing the same thing. Was that snow on the eastern mountains, or just a trick of the light playing in the crystalline air?

Anyway, we’re back. And it was good to see, as we were stuck in that stupid-long traffic jam in Changping, before the light went, that the air in Beijing was almost as clear as in Yanqing today. Of course, that means it’ll get pretty chilly tonight, but bring it on- this is the time of year when I’m looking forward to the relief the cold will provide. A couple of months from now I’ll be thoroughly sick and tired of the sheer amount of clothing I have to take off and put on every time I enter or leave a building, but for now, I’m looking forward to it.

This morning didn’t so much dawn as wade through the thick fog that is still shrouding Beijing. I thought I’d woken up absurdly early, it was so dark, but checked the time and saw that it was actually quite a reasonable time to be awake.

Not good. Very not good. We’re supposed to be heading up to Yanqing today. The fog seems to be clearing up slightly, so hopefully the buses are running. But we need to get there soon, one way or another. For starters, the weather will soon be getting cold, and most of our winter clothes are still up in the village. We’ll be needing them here before too long.

Anyway, time for a typically late weekend breakfast, then we’ll see.

At least now we know where not to go to get cellphones repaired.

As if yesterday’s fog wasn’t bad enough… When I got up at 6:30 this morning it looked like it was still midnight, or as if we’d suddenly been fast-forwarded to mid-winter. I stumbled into the lounge room and looked out the window… or tried to. Yesterday morning at 6:30 I could see the vague, blurred sillhouettes of the highrises no more than one kilometre to the west. This morning? Well, I could see the apartment block just over the fence and the slum immediately north of that, and that’s about it.

And then on the way to work, at quarter to eight, crossing the footbridge over Xidawang Lu to BeiGongDa’s main campus, I looked to the north and saw the traffic light. I looked to the south and saw the traffic light. And that’s pretty much it. I could see the traffic lights immediately north and south of that bridge- neither is much more than fifty metres from the bridge- but that’s just it- I could only see the light, as in little green spots, as in I could not see the intersections those lights attempt to control. Nor could I see the machines emitting the light. Nor could I see anything more than the headlights of the cars approaching or passing through those interesections- again, literally, just the lights.

Well, the fog seems to have lifted slightly since this morning. Crossing back over that bridge at one this afternoon, I could make out the ghostly shadows of buildings roughly 100 metres to the north and south. Still can’t see the highrises west of my loungeroom window, though.

But the fog seems to have defined today. My first lesson was alright, but the second was like pulling teeth from a fossilised dinosaur while swimming through molasses with both hands and feet tied behind my back. Alright, slight exaggeration, but only a slight exaggeration.

Anyway, doesn’t matter, I’m done for the week, the weekend has arrived, and tomorrow we’ll be heading up to the village.