So Beijing has one of those funny temperatures that goes from “Wow, it’s kinda cold” to “Wow, it’s hot outside.” Well, it recently reached the latter part of that temperature scale with the mercury easily climbing to 20C or higher. Now, since most of you reading this here blog have probably never lived or perhaps even visited China (especially Beijing), you might want to know that there are basically two types of weather in Beijing: windy or smog. Add to that either a “cold” or “hot” and that’s the basic breakdown of Beijing’s temperature throughout the seasons.
The upshot of this change of weather, however, is that the trees are green and are already drooping from lack of water. Beijing is a rather dry place and I honestly don’t know how any of these green things survive. They do water these trees on a regular basis but rainfall is lacking. But with all the green also comes the roses and other flowers of spring. If you’re lucky and pass by a particularly green piece of land, you might actually smell fresh air for a change. Despite the constant reminder of the polluted air, Beijing actually looks nice, especially in the summer.
But with the hot weather also comes a drop in attention spans as students (and me, too) begin to look for greener pastures. The Labour Day is coming up this weekend (May 2) and so I have a 4-day weekend, which is great because Monday is my longest day. What will I do? Well, if I ever get motivated, I might just hop on out to one of the neighbouring towns and have a look around and possibly even try to practise my street Chinese.
You might wonder how we survive this onslaught of heat. Luckily our buildings stay nicely cool to the extent that if I stay indoors all day I might actually get cold but it’s a refreshing coolness if you’re outside for any more than a few minutes. To tell the truth, the heat is kind of surprising because, until last week, I had a four inch stack of essays that I had to grade. I honestly can’t even remember how many essays it was, I just kept taking a chunk with me wherever I went and simply went through them.
And with all of that grading I’ve noticed my other reading has dropped quite a bit. Before I mentioned that I started Mo Yan’s Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out. Well, that book sorta took its toll on me and I found I was getting bored after the first 150 pages. So I put that one down and picked up Marco Polo’s Travels and started through that one. I’ve got about 80 pages in and think it’s alright but I still found it was lacking something. Inspiration, maybe? What I mean to say is that I wasn’t inspired by either Mo Yan’s or Marco Polo’s work. So, instead, I found a copy of Martin Ford’s Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future and found that to be more what I was looking for. So I’ve been chewing through that lately.
And this brings me to one of the problems of living in Beijing: the relative lack of access to books that I want to read. Beijing does host the National Library but I don’t know how to borrow books from there and the staff didn’t speak English (and my Chinese isn’t that good) and, more importantly, often lags or lacks getting the latest releases from overseas. Plus, with my work schedule, I’m not sure I could finish a book in the allotted three weeks they give you to read it. All that means I need to do one of a few things: buy books when back in the West; buy whatever I can while here in China; or read digital copies. Buying books, although it sounds smart, is actually kind of expensive and I’d rather get them from libraries. Digital books, although convenient, means I get to stare at a computer screen more often than I would like to.
Anyway, enough of that digression.
It’s hard to believe that I’m only two months away from completing TWO FULL CONTRACTS here in Beijing. This occurrence officially marks the longest I’ve stayed in one place since I left Winnipeg so many years ago. Not only that, this post marks #3 for the month of April, something I haven’t been able to do since November of last year! This really has been a productive month! Let’s hope it stays productive.
All the best!