Eight Weeks

We have only 8 weeks left in China.  As excited as I am to see my friends at home,  I'm in a funk about leaving.  When feeling blue, make a list:

1.  Work:  Work is interested in keeping me on and I love it even though I need to work for a living and not for fun.  So I need a real job with a real salary.  Also, I need more kid-care kind of help to do the global thing well.  I need an au pair or partner or someone like that.  (Watch this space for my sun-and-moon-and-stars personal assistant ad.  I've written it and had it translated but haven't posted it yet because I'm still not sure.)

2.  School:  LiLi's school is still imperfect and too far away but coming from glowing parent-teacher conference comments last week I'm feeling more charitable toward the sweet, smiling yet brutal Chinese teachers.  Also, our school in San Francisco is imperfect too.  I'm planning to apply to a couple of privates in SF and tour some other schools in Beijing so at least I will have a bigger view.

3.  Home:  our apartment is a 3 br/3 ba and full of furniture we own so selling it or storing it is no small thing.  Someone from ministorage came to give me an estimate on Saturday and it's not cheap to store here, even getting rid of a couple of the larger items.  There's all that life stuff that would be time-consuming and expensive to replace:  dishes, coffee maker, wine bottle opener.  So if we're coming back, maybe in 10 months, or two years, we oughta dump it all.  If we're coming back in two months, we oughta keep it.

4.  Health (um, air):  We can see all our docs and dentists etc when we go back and not have to set those things up in China.  But the air.  Bad.  Bad.  Bad.   So bad that many of the air cleaning plants at home and all of them at work have died.  Dead air cleaning plants.  Bad.

5.  Life ease.  Okay so having:  an Ayi who can shop, cook, clean, do laundry, meet the school bus; a homework helper 4 days a week; a chef teacher; a heiche (black car) driver; a cheap closeby massage place and buddy to go with; a pool downstairs; a dry cleaning service in house; great restaurants and a new Thursdays jazz supper club; enough language to get around, all of that might, just might, make up for the fact that every chore, every single day, every single time we step out the door, is challenging and exhausting.

Maizidian Community Center

In the Spring I was taking Chinese classes at our local community center.  

We live in the Maizidian area just West of Chaoyang Park.  Each of the little areas in this huge city has a government run community center, health center, several police stations, and more.  

The community center offers many services including childcare classes, preschool, help for old folks, and more.  It's a vibrant and wonderful place.  Since this area includes many of the embassies some of the signs are in Chinese and English!   

The free survival Chinese language classes are for local foreigners.  It's part of the government sponsored "harmonious society" program.  Our class's teacher was from a language school and was an actual professional teacher.  She was awesome and so patient with our diverse group of foreigners, all trying to pronounce Chinese but sounding German, French, Italian, Indonesian, American, etc.  

They also offer free haircuts to neighborhood retirees.  Local hipster hair stylists volunteer periodically to do the elderly trims:  

Here's the park square on the little lane that leads to the district buildings:

Snow!!!

Yesterday the air was so bad (hazardous AQI) we could smell it: burned tires.  And taste it:  gritty poison.   We had "playground; cafe; store" on our list to do in the morning but the air was too awful.

When we were sitting in our complex's delightful European cafe (owned and run by an amazing Australian chef), it started to rain.  It poured the rest of the day, off and on.  Our dinner company arrived soaked having walked from the subway stop 10-15 minutes.  We wound up going to sleep very very late after our friend left.  So  I gave LiLi an 8 a.m. "earliest" for Sunday morning.  (On the weekends she'll happily get up at 6 despite that the weekday 6:30 wake up time can be challenging.  Hmmmm.)

This morning she came tearing out of her room and into my room ten minutes early to throw open the curtains and yell, "snow!!!!"

We decided to have coffee/hot cocoa before going outside but it seemed to be raining again so we hurried up to get out there, have a snowball fight and a build a mini-snowperson, urban style:

I love Beijing.  

Random Beijing

This building is the home of CCTV.  It was completed earlier this year after many years and a few setbacks.  I've almost (almost) gotten over my fear of living in masonry in a seismic zone, but I don't think I'd ever feel comfortable enough for this.  Locally we call it The Pants:

A public and free thing one sees all over the city are these outdoor gyms.  There's even a mini version on the sidewalk near our apartment.  This one is just underneath our office building and is well used inside of Tuanjiehu Park.  But they are all over, squeezed into space wherever. 

Finally, this is the river, aka mosquito breeding ground, next to the 4th Ring Road just south of Chaoyang Park.  You can also see how smoggy that day was.  It's right next to the huge apartment complex called Park Avenue which is next to the one called Palm Springs.  I didn't even look at apartments at these two complexes mostly because they were too large but also because of their names.  

Liu niao

"Liu niao" or "taking your caged bird for a walk" is a familiar sight in Beijing.  It's a very old tradition that carries on today, even seen on my very urban walk to work.  Sometimes I'll see a cloth covered bird cage strapped to the back of a moped, or a old man with a shoulder-borne carrying stick with a cage on either end. 

Beijing Chef

Our Ayi had a limited repertoire of dishes that we could/would eat.  In the beginning it was a huge problem because LiLi turned up her nose at much of the bland food.   After I came back from a work trip to Hunan reporting that I loved the Hunan spices, she started adding chili sauce and peppers and both LiLi and I were happier.  After several months there were a handful dishes that Ayi and I knew would be eaten so she pretty much stuck to those.  An Indian colleague offered to teach Ayi to cook our favorite chicken tikka masala and she declined to learn.  I tried to teach her to bake cookies when we first bought the table-top oven but it didn't stick.  So, I figured this was what we had and it was fine with me since I didn't have to shop or cook, who cares if we're eating the same things over and over.

But then my mom's group posted a cooking course for Ayis.  I thought that would be perfect so I asked Ayi.  She said she would be interested but we learned that it was very far away and would cost a fortune and an hour or more travel each way.  Then we discovered that the same school--which is also a catering company called Tina's Workshop--would send a chef to teach one's Ayi in one's own home.  Bingo!  Ayi was very enthusiastic about it, surprisingly.  So...in comes Chef Bai:

The first set of dishes I wanted Ayi to learn were seafood dishes.  Since I don't eat meat and since LiLi loves fish, this seemed useful.  Ayi doesn't know how to shop or buy fish, though, so Chef Bai wound up taking her to various markets.  Tina had had to order banana leaves for Vietnamese dish fish steamed in banana leaf.  She got them off Taobao which has everything.  They were beautiful and dried on our clothing rack.

Then the two of them cooked up a storm at our apartment.  It was fantastic!  We had him come a 2nd time too so she learned a total of 8 new dishes including chicken tikka masala and carrot cake.  So now we have an ayi who can cook awesome dishes, and shop for spices and fish.  I love Beijing.

Heat Back On Tomorrow

Like Spring, Fall is a very very short season here.  We went from flip flops one week to boots the next.  The government controls the heat in Beijing and we are cold.  It got down to 1 degree C last night (low 30s F) and with no heat in the apartment we piled both comforters on one bed and slept huddled  together.  In the office my colleagues are wearing coats, scarves and fingerless gloves sitting at our computers.  We talk about the merits of long underwear and wool.  The weekend promises below freezing temps and precipitation.  What?  Um...snow.

Our expat apartment includes an extra four weeks of heat a year, two on the front end and two on the back end.  Everywhere else the heat comes on November 15 and off March 15th.  My real estate agent said we'd appreciate the extra two weeks when the time came and boy, do we.

The government's gongren (workers) have been checking the apartment pipes since the heat comes from hot water radiators.

Last night I came home and changed into sweats that hung on my bathroom door.  They were warm.  I felt the pipes on the wall behind the door, followed them to the radiator and...presto: hot!  I raced to the kitchen to tell Ayi the heat was on and grabbed the kitchen's radiator:  cold.  Ayi said (I think) that they'll come on tomorrow.  Yay!  Heat!  I love Beijing.

PS:  News says heat on earlier for everyone because of cold.