The Talk of Weather

Often we talk about the weather and air quality in Beijing. The other day I was saying to someone that I never think about what to wear outside, it never rains or snows. According to article below, not only has it been drier than normal but also warmer. If this is warmer I cannot wait to see a cold winter. It sure seems like it has not been over 35 the whole winter. Turns out I am using the wrong measure and should be measuring the the sanjui days (coldest days). All of this means a potentially good sandstorm year for the spring months.

Beijing Environment Watchdog Warns of Sandstorms

Beijingers can prepare handkerchiefs and face masks for dusty weather this spring because little snow has so far fallen in the dry, grey Chinese capital, a city environmental official said on Monday.

"Beijing is experiencing a warm, dry winter so sands can easily be stirred up. If the present weather continues, then severe sandstorms are likely in the spring," said Shi Hanmin, head of the municipal Environmental Protection Bureau.
Beijing has experienced two snowfalls this winter and the temperature on sanjiu days, a traditional term for the coldest days of the year, stood at minus 1.3 degrees Celsius, the warmest for 13 years.

Last year, the city reported 241 so-called "blue sky days", or days with fairly good air quality, when particulate matter in the air is less than 100 micrograms per cubic meter, according to the environmental bureau.

"It is hard for us to improve on 60 percent of blue sky days per year. We don't have many new solutions to combat dusty weather," Shi said.

But he said Beijing will renovate more than 1,100 coal-fuelled boilers and replace 2,580 old buses by the end of the year in further anti-pollution efforts.

"Also, next year, the city will apply Euro IV emission standards to new vehicles to cut automobile pollutants," Shi said. In the event of sandstorms, city authorities will ask roadside stores, companies and other institutions to sweep the dust from streets and roofs so as to prevent further air pollution, he said.

Beijing experienced 17 sandstorms last spring, and the most serious one in April saw some 300,000 tons of sand and dust dumped on the city.
(Xinhua News Agency January 22, 2007)

The picture above is from a sandstorm April 2006 which hit Beijing. Here is more information on that storm:
http://earth.esa.int/ew/special_events/china_sandstorm-apr06/

Experienced Expats

Expat living is an interesting experience especially in a country that is as foreign as China. We continue to meet very interesting people from around the globe who continue to help shape our perspectives. The most interesting are the one’s who have been here for more than a decade.

Last night we had dinner at a very nice hot pot restaurant not far from our home (of course the logistics to get there were a challenge but we did make it). We were invited by a work colleague and his wife who have been of invaluable help to us here in Beijing. They introduced us to three other people who have lived here more than a decade. All of them possess fantastic mandarin skills and also drive in Beijing. These are two skills that we will never possess during our two year visit.

The changes they have seen over the last decade in China are difficult to imagine, especially for expats. They recall when there was only one place that English speaking people would go to socialize, the Beijing Hotel. Today there are so many places to go and so many more resources available to us. They remember when there were virtually no cars on the roads and only a see of bicycles (now that is really hard to imagine).

The Digital Life in China

The Digital life in Beijing has deteriorated since returning from the Holidays. I doubt there was much press in the US about the situation. An earthquake near Taiwan on December 26th disrupted the communication lines between the US and China. As a result, we have to do things differently in our digital life. One example of this............. I would like to add pictures to my blog but that does not seem to be possible right now. I have been able to post some new pictures including Hong Kong on ourWebshots site but for some reason not on this blog.

Vonage still seems to work okay as does Slingbox. Getting to our Hotmail is a real challenge and so is getting to some US websites. Lots of pages get time-out messages. You have to very patient. We understand that their are delays to repairing the communication lines. Hopefully, the repairs will be made soon.
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2007-01/19/content_788005.htm
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2007-01/16/content_784152.htm

The other challenge we have in China is censorship. Often there are pages that do not come back on the Internet. One example is Wikepedia. We cannot get to this website, their must be some article in there that is critical of the Chinese government. Some expats have told us about some software that we could download and would disguise our proxy settings (we have not resorted to this yet).

AF has been accepted into another University---Trinity in Dublin. She is still waiting to hear from her first choice, St. Andrews.

Hong Kong

Hong Kong on a winter weekend was a great quick escape from Beijing. We went with four other travelers from work. The flight took close to 4 hours (doesn't seem like there is any place close to Beijing). We decided to stay at the Disneyland Hotel as our base for the weekend. Overall we found Hong Kong to be a great cosmopolitan city where everyone seems to speak English. It was so hard not to sprinkle in some of our Mandarin words we have recently learned like hello, thank you, and goodbye.
Disneyland Hong Kong
Disneyland is a very nice facility and not too far from the airport. Disneyland Hotel is very nice and reminds me of the Grand Floridian in Disney World. The package we got included two days in the park and character breakfast each day. We spent most of our first day on in the park. It is a very small park that opened in September 2005. The park consists of Main Street, U.S.A., Adventureland, Fantasyland, and Tomorrowland. We hit Space Mountain at least 10 times and Buzz Lightyear Astro Blasters a number of times. There were some shows like Lion King, Mickey’s PhilharMagic, and the “Disney on Parade”. We snacked on the caramel corn and baby smoked turkey legs (much smaller and not as juicy as the one’s in the US, maybe due to the available resources). SC and CC left around 4 to go to Kowloon where his bother lives to spend the night. The rest of us stayed in the park until 6. Hong Kong City
We decided to finish off the long day by heading into the city to experience some of the nightlife. We went back to the hotel to drop off our backpacks and took a taxi to Kowloon to save time. We squeezed into a large 5-seater Toyota sedan. There were four of us squeezed in the back seat. We then took the Star Ferry from Kowloon into Hong Kong city just for the touristy view. While it was an overcast night, it was still a great view of the city building and nightlights.

Once we got into the city we walked until we got to the hopping nightlife in Lan Kwai Fong. We found a nice table at a bar opened right onto the street to view the interesting night scene. It was amazing how many older western guys accompanied young Asian women. We saw some very wild clothing and people. We had a few rowdies in the back of the bar watching Liverpool beat Chelsea. Eight minutes into the game and there was loud hooting and cursing for joy.

We also noticed there were some very interesting young people who kept going back into a narrow entryway next to our bar. CB and AF decided to check it out and see what we were missing. They went up a stairway to the second story to be met by a big bouncer who said it was a private birthday party (interesting).

We also were admiring a banner hung over the entrance of bar across the street advertising two drinks - Mojitos and Caipirinah. CB Was curious and wandered across the street to learn more about the drink. He disappeared back into the bar. We waited and kept looking for him to come back out. When he finally came out he wanted us all to come over and try the Caipirinah, his treat. The drink is a Brazilian concoction of rum, limes, and sugar. Traditionally the Brazilians use cachaça which is distilled alcohol made from sugar cane juice as opposed to molasses (rum). The bartender used a long pestle to grind the limes for the drink. It was very tasty drink and had a punch.

Next we walked around the block for some sightseeing and then back to the ferry to catch a taxi in Kowloon to go back to the hotel. We got back to the hotel after midnight and were dead tired. CB decided to stay up at the bar for a little longer. We had no problems sleeping until 8:30 the next morning.

Sunday Shopping
On Sunday we had another character breakfast to start the day. CB decided to head back into the park as his foot was acting up and he had some more Disney shopping still to do (he is a true Disneyphile). The three of us went into the city with SL to do some sightseeing and shopping at Shanghai Tang and Stanley Market. We decided to take a taxi directly to Victoria Peak first from the Hotel. It was a scenic drive on a very misty and foggy day. It felt like San Francisco. SL felt at home since he lived there for a couple of years. We could not see anything from this famous Peak Tower. We took the scenic Peak Tram back down into the city where we picked up a taxi to start our shopping experience. We started with Stanley Market, which we thought was close by in the Central District but turned out to be a half hour taxi ride. Stanley Market is an open-air market, selling many traditional handicrafts and clothes at reasonable prices that we can get plenty of in Beijing. Kind of a waste for us but I’m sure tourists who have not been to other parts of China would find it interesting.

We took another taxi back to the city for some serious Shanghai Tang shopping. SL is a Shanghai Tang frequent shopper. I assumed there could not be that many stores worldwide (in Beijing there is one in the Oriental Plaza where SL lives and at the Beijing airport). The city central store is their large 2-story flagship store. It must have taken well over an hour of looking at every clothing and accessory item. I sat on a comfortable ottoman while the 3 of them shopped.

I have to say I have had enough of the lime and pink Chinese stuff in the shop. To my surprise we SL and BF found another store at the Hong Kong airport. They shopped or another 30 minutes in the HK airport store. To even my bigger surprise there was another store in the airport at the other end of the terminal where our flight to Beijing was departing from. I sat at a bar with CB while SL and BF amazingly shopped some more...........crazy. When we caught up with SC and CC at the airport gate SC made a great comment, "Shanghai Tang is the Polo of China".

Small World
Since we have moved half away around the world we have come to realize how small the world is actually becoming to us. Twice, count it twice, I ran into people that I knew from Beijing. I ran into a non-JPM employee that I had worked with back in February and May of 2006 in Beijing. He was in line with his family entering Disneyland. His English was good enough to stop and say hi and we introduce everyone in our groups to each other. We had to take a picture. On Hong Kong Island after a night of partying we ran into a couple that live in our apartment building in Beijing. Both of us just happened to be visiting the city the same non-holiday weekend.

The City
My impression of the city in our short time is that it is very multi-cultural and cosmopolitan like NYC. The terrain was spectacular with the sea, the mountains, tropical vegetation, mixed with and large, modern, colorful sky scrapers. The weather was a comfortable 60 degrees with off and on rain and mist and some wind. It is definitely worth going back some day. We certainly did not have time to take it all in.

Coming of Age

Look out world; we have added a new legal drinker to the human race (in China that is). We added another one just 3 months ago in the US.

BF returned just in time to celebrate AF’s birthday, so it was a doubly nice day. We have missed AF for the last two weeks in Beijing, just AF and her Dad.

We wanted to celebrate AF’s birthday with a cake and a drink. We had the cake but no drink; it was a school day for AF. We have also learned that she does not like alcohol anyway, as far as we know. Good for her and I hope it stays that way.

China Skiing

One of our more adventurous members of of the team has been out exploring the local Beijing ski slopes. He arranged a quick ski trip for a group of us to Shi Jing Long Ski Resort http://www.sjlski.com/.

AF and I were one of the first stops at 5:50am. We then went to Shunyi to pick up two other families and then we were on our way into the countryside. We got to the resort at around 8:15 am.

Our driver Mr. Wu did a great job of navigating through the bureaucracy of getting onto the slopes:
1. Make reservation a few days in advance (cheaper that way)
2. Pay an admission ticket to get into the gates of the resort
3. Get in line to pay for the equipment rental and lift tickets
4. Go to the ski clothing counter (none of us needed to rent the colorful one-piece ski outfits that may not have been washed since the season began).
5. To the boot counter to find your metric size boots
6. Get a locker for the shoes
7. Pick up skis or snowboards and then select ski poles
8. The bindings were adjusted once outside the building
9. Then to the only chair lift that was operating since we were early (the great thing is we did not need a lift ticket to show to the chair operator)
10. Oh there are no chair operators to help you on the lift. The operators are close by to shut the lift down if one of us falls trying to get on or off the lift.

Being early had many benefits most of which was to navigate the bureaucracy without waiting. The resort says it has 7 slopes. There was really only one long slope with one chair that went half way and another chair lift that went to the top. The rest of the "slopes" were a number of surface lifts next to each other on a gentle beginner field.

The skiing was fast packed powder on man-made snow. All of this was in contrast to the desert mountain terrain with no snow. All of the vegetation was dried out shrub growing in the arid ground.

Everybody had a good time and there were no injuries, except the broken pole that I had to pay 30 RMB for (which is a whole other story). We left the slopes at 12:30 just as bus loads of people were checking in and getting their equipment.

Happy New Year

The end of the year holiday break was really nice for all of us. The three of us went home to the US. BF and AF left before me and I joined them on Dec 20th. The entire family got together for a couple of weeks which was wonderful. We spent a few days in NY with family members but then returned back to the US to spend time with friends and family. It is bittersweet that the break is coming to an end and time for AF and me to go back home to Beijing. I feel a little homesick and almost wish that I could stay longer but that is not possible. It is time to get back to our life in Beijing.

I had recently posted some information on Christmas in China. I ran into this little video that I thought you might like. Christmas is just a festival for celebrating and has no meaning behind it in China, check it out......................
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auwrzHnRGCU

Not everyone is happy with these developments. See attached China Daily article:
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2006-12/21/content_764912.htm

I will be posting from China again, soon.