Posts by Chris Waugh
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Well, I was kinda cheating a little bit with the sun. It had just popped over the Jundushan mountains along the southern rim of the basin, but hadn't yet cleared either the poplars that line the old highway that runs along the side of our village or the dried up old corn stalks that one of the farmers had left standing after the harvest. But yeah, it's cold up there.
On the plus side, summers up there are much, much more tolerable than here in Beijing.
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Islander mentioned hail, which, for whatever reason, we don't see a lot of around these parts, but I have been having "fun" with other kinds of meteorological frozen things. Dawn, New Years Day in my wife's home village in Yanqing County, for example. I go out to check on the car, which, this time of year I park in a patch of field that gets the sun as early as possible, and this is what I see from the driver's seat. That's not just frost, that ice is so solid that the best course of action is to wait for the sun to melt it off, cos it's not easy to dislodge any other way. And even after sitting in the sun for a few hours, it took the 15 minute drive into the county town and a couple more hours sitting in the sun while we did our shopping before I could get any wiper fluid to squirt far enough to actually be on any use cleaning the windscreen. That stuff is supposed to be good down to minus 25, and although Yanqing is Beijing's coldest county by virtue of its altitude, it doesn't (at least, officially) get that cold.
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A little lunchtime reading. It's not often New Zealand makes it into the news here in China. Sometimes it's a slow news day and there's an opportunity for one of those "Look at the funny people!" stories. Of late it's always been of the "something terrible has happened", though.
I was sent down to a nearby restaurant for one of my wife's favourite dishes (which happens to be one of the few Chinese foods I really can't stand), and I picked up 新京报/The Beijing News to read while I waited. Given a recent rather horrible event in the Wairarapa, I flipped through to the world news to see. Sure enough, there it was, the pictured article, apparently largely lifted from the NZ Herald (新西兰先驱报/xīnxīlán xiānqū bào, if you're curious．Odd, the dictionary defines xiānqū as pioneer or forerunner), about the balloon crash in Carterton.
Stay safe people.
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Capture: Roamin' Holiday, in reply to Lilith __,
Thanks. Hopefully the forecast cloudy weather for the next couple of days brings more snow. But looking at that photo I'm thinking we need to find where we put her mittens.
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Ah, pohutukawa and other flowery things and beaches and summer... At least this morning Beijing finally turned on a little bit of magic.
Me and my daughter.
Her first snow happened to coincide with her first fever, so she was stuck inside feeling miserable.
Her second snow was a piddly affair, a few tiny flakes floating about for half an hour filling cracks in the concrete, but nothing more.
Her third snow, the first of 2012, and she finally got to go outside and check it out.
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Snow this morning. My daughter is not having the best weather luck. She was born March 31, just in time for the spring sandstorms, but fortunately we didn't get any this time round, so she's not having the worst weather luck either. She spent the summer at her maternal grandparents' place in the mountains northwest of her. Last summer was the first time ever I have not wanted a blanket on my overnight up there. This is her first winter in the world. The first snowfall this winter she got a fever, so there was no way we were going to take her outside to play. This morning was the second snow this winter. It was settling, even on the mainroad which the traffic normally keeps warm enough to melt the snow instantly. But it was very light snow, hardly enough to actually notice unless you were outside in it, minuscule snowflakes you had to squint to see. And then it stopped by midday. And so Beijing remains a dusty grey, southerly breeze bringing up humidity and air from the coastal swamps and industrial towns of southern Hebei, the kind of air that puts streaks of black in your snot. It could still snow, and that would help clear some of the pollution out of the air and make Beijing look soft and beautiful for once. It's always a bit of a shock to see Beijing looking beautiful.
Oh, wait, dispatches from summer. Sorry.
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Hard News: Dispatches from Summer, in reply to Ross Mason,
The Chinese kerosene (small k) er..wine(?)
Sounds like 白酒/báijiǔ. Not many non-Chinese can stomach it, but you'll have to trust me that although some of it should be better used stripping paint or fuelling jet planes, some of it can actually be quite nice - and surprisingly cheap, too. It seems most Beijing expats are most familiar with báijiǔ in its Little Green Bottle of Evil form, which is one of the cheapest and most plentiful forms of báijiǔ, but tastes foul and leaves you with one hell of a hangover. On the other hand, for about the same price as a Little Green Bottle of Evil, one can buy a Měnggǔwáng Kǒubēi which is a glass of báijiǔ and sealed with an aluminuim top. In addition to being cheap, it's quite a nice way to wash down a mid-winter meal when the Gobi Desert wind is howling, and when you've finished you have a handy new glass of quite an appropriate size for many different spirits.
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Hard News: Dispatches from Summer, in reply to Ross Mason,
Is there anything else but food at this time of year?
Yes. Just got me a one litre can of Kaiserdom Dragon Year 2012 Special Edition and a 5 litre... ummm.... keglet of Pfungstädter. Back when I moved to this part of Beijing the most special thing that supermarket sold was Anchor butter. Unfortunately their imported German beers are too expensive for anything but a special occasion... But I'm a Dragon and it's my year coming up, and the 5 litre keglets are on special and it's Christmas.
So food and drink.
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Just taught the last class of the semester. Exams next week. Preparing for my daughter's first Christmas, and I have to say it's actually quite fun resurrecting the family traditions to pass them on to the next generation.
But I found myself wishing we could be back in NZ where my daughter would be able to run around outside barefoot in the warmth. I have decided that putting Christmas in the middle of winter is horribly uncivilised and only the Southern Hemisphere gets the timing right. Unfortunately she's going to have to endure a couple of bone dry, frigid Beijing Christmases before we can show her the way things should be done. I hope Father Christmas has got wheels to attach to his sleigh, cos snow is only marginally likely in this rather more arid corner of Eurasia than it is back home.
And so I find myself taking Southern Hemisphere traditions that were adapted from Northern Hemisphere traditions and readapt them to suit another corner of the Northern Hemisphere.
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Hard News: The Next Labour Leader, in reply to Isaac Freeman,
Ultimately you just have to trust that teachers know what they're doing, but that doesn't sit well when you're expected to come back to voters in three years with successes to report.
So with national standards and charter schools, N-ACT is breaking the system to make sure there's plenty for the next government to fix?
I'm not overly familiar with the current state of the NZ education system, but based on memory and what I read in the news and here, it would seem to me that it's not broken, but there are some things that could use a bit of maintenance. And some problems can be fixed by throwing money at them. Properly funding the education system right from pre-school to PhD so that teachers and academics get good wages (cos their jobs are actually, like, really important, as in up their with doctors, nurses and farmers in terms of providing the basic necessities of life) and schools don't need various kinds of fundraising drives or full fee paying foreign students to make up the shortfall in cash needed for maintenance and equipment and books would be a good start.
Genuine programmes to actually end poverty would also help. Sick, hungry kids can't learn well. Ending violence, too. It's disturbing to read of how many NZ teachers fear for their safety at school. That's certainly not something I have to worry about in China.
I hated high school. One reason was that sporting success was celebrated far more quickly and to a far greater degree than academic success. Sorry, but that is just fucked. Sport is good, sure, but can we please change social attitudes so that bright kids are encouraged?
And could we please persuade our political leadership to finally abandon the absolutely ridiculous, perverse idea that education is a private good, and that stupid, narrow minded ideas of "user pays" should not be inflicted on education? Education, from pre-school up to and beyond PhD, is, and always has been, a public good. An educated populace is a happier, healthier, more productive populace that makes better long term decisions for the good of its society.
So, I dunno, that's just what I can see that could use some fixing. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe all of those problems have been fixed over the dozen years I've been in China. I hope so. I doubt it. In any case, nothing's ever perfect and there's always stuff that can be improved.
But let's face it: N-ACT has no interest in fixing these things. An underclass represents a pool of potential cheap labour and makes work less secure, which helps drive wages down, which helps N-ACT's constituency make more money. Anyways, poor people are only poor because they're lazy sinners. Good, virtuous, hard working people all get rich. Obviously. Geez, how much of modern politics is actually the Prosperity Doctrine heresy writ secular?
