haonowshaokao

Last week the company decided that renting an apartment in the centre for no particular reason wasn’t a great business move, so I’ve been forced to move my few things out of there and resume the daily commute from Tongzhou. It’s a little worse now, too – previously I could take a single bus, then cycle the last leg, but now it’s too cold for that.
The winter has arrived here with frightening immediacy. I’d swear that it was summer only last week, now going outside has already become a chore. Winter here, as has been previously mentioned in detail, isn’t a lot of fun. Right now it’s got to the point where it’s too cold to take off your coat (even indoors), but we’re still a couple of weeks away from the 10th of November – the day somebody somewhere presses a button and the buildings of Beijing get central heating – and the spring feels like an age away. By the time I can wear a T-shirt again I’ll be a father. That’s an exciting yet depressing thought!
It’s been over a year now since I came back to China. I’ve got married, lived in six houses, worked for eight schools, become a headmaster (of sorts) and even learned a bit of Chinese. The next year looks like being just as eventful, but I’m too busy to think about it right now. In fact, I’d better get back to marking essays and stop writing this.

I spent a couple of weeks commuting into the centre from Tongzhou, and it’s proved to be completely impractical. Getting up at 6.50, eating my breakfast on the bus and not getting home until 7.40pm is at best an occasional deal, and doing it every day was only bearable because it was a temporary measure until an alternative had come up.
We’d planned to hire out a weekday place near to my office, a room in a shared house or something, but our investigations didn’t really get anywhere, and we’re both beyond tired of searching websites, visiting festering, overpriced apartments and dealing with Chinese estate agents (who make their British counterparts look like saints). Then, a couple of weeks ago, someone had the idea that I slept in the classroom.
This is nowhere near as ridiculous as it sounds. Our school has recently had to rent an apartment around the corner to turn into an extra classroom. Right now there aren’t very many students, so it doesn’t get used more than once or twice a week, usually at the weekend when I’m in Tongzhou anyway. It still pretty much looks like an apartment, has drinking water and a bed. It’ll do for weekdays, at least for the 10 weeks left in this year. After that, we’ll just have to see.
My work on Sundays is also finished or finishing, so I’m getting a weekend of sorts.

On Saturday I went with V to the “Army Hospital” in Tongzhou. We’re scouting round the different maternity hospitals in the local area and right now it seems like the best bet.
All the same, it’s a Chinese hospital, and Chinese hospitals are, in short, a bit rubbish. If you think British hospitals are big on pointless queuing, waiting, filling in forms and walking around trying to work out where you should be then you’ve never been in a Chinese one. In addition they want your money at every point, and because it’s a gynecological department men aren’t allowed anywhere except the corridor. Still, sitting in various corridors may be dull, but it’s not actually unpleasant, just a shame I wasn’t allowed in to see the ultrasound scan. Mind you, even V wasn’t allowed to see the screen, she was just given a printout. With the one-child policy they’re understandably concerned that female foetuses will be aborted, so have gone out of their way to make sure that nobody can find out the sex of their baby.
The hospital is fairly clean and not particularly rude to us, so we might well use it. There’s one more possible place in Tongzhou, but it’s probably not any better. Either way, both are a world away from the horrible places we saw in the centre. After five hours there we didn’t feel like checking out the other hospital, so took the bus back home. The sky was so smoggy it looked like dusk at 3pm. Tongzhou can be a depressing, run-down place in certain areas, and certain times, and this was both, but just having an afternoon off just hanging out is great anyway.
You can tell V is pregnant now, just about. There’s a bulge and she can feel it kicking all the time, but nobody is offering her a seat on the bus or trying to feel her belly. Her mother’s fussing around her all the time, directing her to eat piles of eggs for breakfast and avoid a huge list of things which I’m certain have no ill effects. The date’s still a way off, but approaching rapidly now.

A week off is a pretty rare thing for me, and 10 days off is almost unheard of, even if I did have a little left-over work (one-on-one students and the like) to take up some of that time. I hadn’t made any particular plans for the use of this time, and it’s a good job I hadn’t, because last Thursday saw the surprise arrival of 6 of V’s relatives from Hubei – two of her aunts, two cousins and two children, making eleven of us in total. Thankfully our house just about has room for this many people, especially since some of them actually seem to enjoy sleeping on the ping pong table.
As visitors to Beijing they naturally wanted to go out to the centre pretty much every day, and need to be accompanied on the occasionally tortuous journey. I went with them just once, to see the Temple of Heaven, which is ok, but far from spectacular. Most of the time other members of the family accompanied them on their trips and I stayed at home working on my various projects, joining them for meals and occasional evening activities. All very tame but pleasant – naturally communication between them and me was fairly limited since they all use the strange dialect of V’s hometown, and if my Mandarin is poor then my “Wuxuehua” is almost non-existent. I do speak the international language of carrying bags and paying entrance fees though, so in-depth conversation proved unnecessary.
The real entertainment of the last week has been the arguments. I’ve often heard TV pundits talking about family gatherings inevitably involving massive rows, but had previously not believed them. Well, I was wrong. I’ve heard arguments on every conceivable topic from the trivial to the deadly serious, all carried on at the same pitch. Fortunately none of these have involved me or V, so I’ve just kept out of the way and listened to her describe the feuds when the heat has died down or people have gone out. I’m neither bothered nor amused by this, but it’s good to have frequent reminders that, in spite of any doubts I might have from time to time, I’m actually quite well-adjusted, happy and sane.
On the whole it’s actually been a lot of fun, and I’m looking forward to taking another trip down to Wuxue next summer. I’ll have to pretend to be seeing everything for the first time as the first trip (where we failed to visit any of them in the three days) is still a secret.

Just one-and-a-half days of holiday left, then, and only two and a half months of this ridiculous schedule to put up with before the promise of better everything next year. Good world news today, so overall a sense of cautious optimism leading into winter.