Just when you thought it was safe...

…WATER reared its ugly, pointy-toothed head again this week. Peter, back in Harbin for the week, went home from work on Wednesday to find there was absolutely no running water in the flat. He called Kevin to find out what was going on. Kevin phoned building management and came back with the response that it was switched off for ‘routine maintenance’ (nice of them to warn us) and that it would be back on ‘hopefully before Saturday’.

‘SATURDAY???!!!!!!’ shrieked Peter (who was flying back to Shanghai on Friday and didn’t fancy leaving toilets unflushed and taps in a dubious on/off position). ‘I’m sorry’, said Kevin glumly. ‘I don’t know what to say to make you happy’. Poor lad, he always takes it personally. In the event, it was back on by the time Peter got up on Thursday morning, but not before he’d texted me at 10.30pm saying he was going to bed because he was ‘so depressed about it’.

Then on Friday morning, I tried to turn on a tap in Shanghai, to find that the water had gone off here too! It had been fine half an hour earlier so I suspected it was somehow connected to the loud drilling, banging, and overpowering smell of solvent which had all been emanating from the flat upstairs since 8am. I went back to bed and by the time I woke up we were back on tap. What is it with these people though? Back home, if your water is scheduled to be switched off for five minutes you get a note through the door a week in advance. Here, the notion that they might be inconveniencing anyone simply doesn’t seem to cross their minds.

The chief species of water inconveniencing me at the moment, however, is that which I’m lugging around in my belly and my legs. A couple of Sundays ago I looked down to find my bump had undergone a sudden growth spurt and seemed to be sticking out several inches further than it had done that morning. At 33 (or is it 34 – they can’t decide) weeks pregnant, I am now the size of a house – no, make that a largish hotel - and need a crane to levitate me off the sofa most nights. Not much fun when the temperature is already hovering around the 30 degree mark – although believe it or not, Harbin was actually hotter than Shanghai this week. This – coupled with the frustrations of an internet connection which is becoming increasingly slow for unknown reasons – explains my lack of blogging recently. It’s a long walk to the computer these days, and this desk ain’t big enough for the both of us!

The size of my tum caused some consternation last time I visited the hospital. ‘You gain too much weight!’ ‘Too much eat!!’ (charming), ‘You have big baby! We must check!’. One ultrasound later, and Baby was revealed not to be a monster - apart from the head, which was already 92% of the size of a full-term baby’s! – nor was chocolate the culprit, or not the sole one anyway. No, my problem, it appears, is ‘too much fluid’. (Bloody water. I’m telling you.) So now they want to do another ultrasound tomorrow to make sure the fluid levels have stabilised. ‘But if your belly suddenly get bigger, call us and come in STRAIGHT AWAY!’ They certainly know how to stress me out.

The trouble is that having grown up with the NHS, to me the words ‘I’d like to run some further tests’ strike fear into the heart. British doctors only ever say this if they think there might be something seriously wrong with you. Otherwise their standard advice is ‘Take two paracetamol, go to bed and ring me in the morning’. So I’ve been having some trouble adjusting to the ‘We test because we can’ approach of private medicine, especially that practised by American-trained doctors and aimed mainly at American patients. I finally understand those episodes of ER where the storyline involved the docs haranguing some poor unfortunate who needed an arm transplant or whatever but couldn’t afford it because their insurance didn’t cover it.

In fact most of my preconceptions about private medicine have been turned on their heads. There are no hushed, white rooms or smiling nurses gliding about offering you biscuits. On the contrary, it’s all a bit like ER really, minus the shouting, the shooting and the helicopter crashes. Time being money, the doctors seem to see about six patients at once and scurry about between multiple consulting rooms. They run vast swathes of tests for everything under the sun, with no apparent consideration of the cost to you or actual probability that you might have the condition concerned.

When, in my naivety, I tried to refuse a certain test on the grounds that I didn’t think I needed it, it was too expensive, and, hey, actually, wasn’t I the ‘customer’ and therefore had the right to decline anything I didn’t want, all hell nearly broke loose. It became apparent that they had never encountered such a response before. The nurses were highly confused, the doctor embarked on a quite unwarranted prophesy of doom, and in the end I felt so bullied that I backed down, on the understanding that this was ‘absolutely the last blood test’ they would perform on me. Not so, as it turns out – but being Chinese, of course, they won’t tell you in advance what they’ve got up their sleeves for you in the future, preferring to spring it on you when you go in for what you think is a routine check-up. And nobody has the time or, apparently, the inclination, to consider the psychological impact of all this, or indeed to acknowledge that there might be an emotional side to pregnancy at all.

So, caught between Chinese vagueness and American hyper-efficiency, I sometimes find myself longing to wait three hours for a doctor who’ll say ‘Well that all looks ok to me, but come back and see me again if anything actually drops off.’ But I suppose that the standard of care I get here will be ultimately much better, the medical staff are more likely to speak fluent English, and at least I won’t die of MRSA. I just wish there was a fast track for this baby business. Nine months is a long time.

Watery woes

You know how they say that as you get older, you just turn into your parents? Well I think it’s finally happened, and not quite in the way I expected.

My father had a deep loathing of problems with water. Of a household or environmental nature. He hated rain, refused to visit certain places on the grounds that they were ‘too bloody wet’, and at home any burst pipe or leaking window was always the source of immense trauma. Unfortunately, like a cat instinctively making a feline beeline for someone who’s allergic, it was as if water knew how much he hated it, and concocted ever crueller and more inventive ways of tormenting him. Like the time he and my mother looked after an elderly neighbour’s house one Christmas and ended up having to defrost a foot-thick block of ice off her water tank. Or when they drove me to university for the first time, staying away for the weekend, and came back to find our hall under three or four inches of water and the house with several thousand pounds’ worth of damage thanks to a toilet cistern which had cracked just before we left the house, and had been continually refilling for two days. The malice of water.

Well it’s a good job he never went to Shanghai. In Harbin our domestic difficulties mainly seemed to involve electrics. We had bulbs blowing and tripping not just one fuse but the entire flat; dodgy starters (or ‘cube things’ to give them their technical name as employed by Kevin!) on lights, and a meter which you had to pay for in advance. But ever since we got here it’s been one disaster after another, and every one of them has involved water in some capacity or other. I know I alluded to these before, but I feel compelled now to share the soggy and unpleasant details with you.

First of all there was the washing machine, which you’ll recall was broken when we moved in. It’s a knackered, old-fashioned washer-dryer contraption – one of those with a dial which turns through all the programmes – 1996 model, I was informed, and it belongs in the scrapyard. No washing machine is designed to last that long. I think 13 years in washing machine time is like dog years and it’s about 276 by our reckoning. The writing on the front has mostly worn off so that you can’t read which programme is which – although as it’s all in Chinese this is less of a problem for me than it could be. It rocks and shudders with alarming vigour when spinning and makes a noise like a small puppy being tortured and then run over by a juggernaut. In Harbin I had a lovely new one – purchased by us on the day we moved in – so it was always going to be a difficult adjustment, but I comforted myself with the thought that at least it isn’t a horrid toploader, which are still pretty much standard in China, and it’s indoors, unlike those in a couple of the apartments I looked round which had their washing machines on a balcony outside.

Anyway when we came to use it we found that the motor which turns the dial had given out, meaning the thing would wash, rinse or spin indefinitely unless you cranked the dial manually round to the next number. Grrr. How the previous tenants failed to notice this is beyond me. Either they must have thought this was how it was supposed to work, or else they never did any washing; probably the latter, if their other standards of domestic cleanliness are anything to go by – and I refer my readers to my last-but-one post to appreciate the level of squalour which would provoke ME to make such a statement.

So we got it fixed. Or rather the landlord’s pal, Mr Sun, got it fixed for us. New motor. All well and good.

Then one night last week, when Peter was in Harbin, I was (ironically) hanging out some washing when I heard a sound like water gushing. Knowing I hadn’t left any taps running, I ignored it, telling myself it must be ‘coming from upstairs’ even though I could tell fine well it was in our flat somewhere. Denial’s great, isn’t it? Sadly after half an hour, on my third check of the kitchen sink from which the sound seemed to be emanating, I was forced rudely out of denial by the large puddle in which I found myself standing. Opening the cupboard under the sink, I found a geyser coming from somewhere up at the top of the cold water pipe. Fortunately taps in China all seem to be fitted with their own individual stopcock so I didn’t have to go searching the place for a mains tap, or do without water until the following day or anything. But I did have to do an excessive amount of mopping, putting down of old newspapers, and making phone calls to Sherry, our new interpreter, to get Mr Sun to send out a plumber. Grrr again.

Anyway it turns out Mr Sun is a bit of a dab hand at the old plumbing himself. He came round and mended it personally the next day, producing from nowhere a length of new pipe, and a giant sealant gun with which he fixed the sink more securely in place, and he even cleaned gritty stuff out of the tap for me. All this was conducted with – on his part - facial expressions and gestures of contempt (for the cowboys who put it in, I hope, rather than for me), and on mine the exclamations of shock, gratitude and general female helplessness which, I’m pleased to be able to report, seem to work with tradesmen the world over.

All was quiet for a couple of days, until it was time for Washing Machine Revisited. I’d used it maybe five or six times since its repair, but clearly it was too much. Grrrrrr once more. This time the motor was turning, but the fan belt must have either slipped or snapped off, as I discovered it had completed the best part of a towels wash without the drum turning at all. Result: several sopping wet and not fully rinsed towels, which I had to hang up in the shower (where they acquired rust marks) to drip dry, and then put on the washing line on the balcony (where they acquired black marks from the pollution) to get wet again in the rain.

Ah, the rain. After 15 years in Scotland I should really be used to it, but it’s amazing how six months in Harbin’s dry inland climate can lull you into a place where the notion of water suddenly falling out of the sky is a surprise. I think I only saw actual rain twice in the whole time we were there, and snow no more than half a dozen times. Shanghai, on the other hand, is not only on the coast (like Edinburgh), but is in a sub-tropical zone. Which means that when it rains, it RAINS. Especially in spring.

It’s obviously such a big part of life here that they have a well-developed umbrella culture, with umbrella stands in offices and restaurants, and staff handing you specially-shaped plastic bags to put over your brolly when you enter shops. Why do they not do this in Scotland? Why? The Shanghaiers, particularly those riding bikes or scooters, all wear sensible waterproof ponchos which cover them and their vehicle almost entirely. (They also work for baby bumps!) Again, why don’t we do this back home? The denizens of Edinburgh seem to prefer to walk along with water dripping off their noses and all their clothes soaked through rather than risk looking uncool in a funny mac. But then I suppose looking uncool isn’t much of a consideration for Chinese people; let’s face it, with the poodle perms and bad shorts most of them are starting from what my doctor would call ‘a rather low base’ as it is.

Unfortunately, when we went out to the supermarket last Sunday, I had yet to acquire my bump-covering poncho, and had only a rather old and not-terribly-waterproof-any-more coat and a pair of even older, suede Converse trainers to put on. Peter had his Harbin outdoor coat with the ceramic beads, but ceramic beads ain’t much use against the kind of downpour we encountered. At least not when it takes 15 minutes to get a taxi to the shops, and about 40 minutes – in the dark and in absolute driving rain, soaked to the skin and carrying heavy food shopping, all of which got drenched and had to be dried out on the dining table – to get one home again.

The trouble was that people kept stealing our spot by dodging ahead of us and hopping into taxis which by rights should have been ours, due to our inability to hop anywhere on account of my bump and the shopping. Two men in unmarked cars did pull up and offer us lifts (in English) but we declined in case they were bilingual axe murderers or – more likely – just saw an opportunity to take us for a huge amount of money. By the time we got home we’d have won first prize at an international rat-drowning festival, and all the contents of my handbag –which was done up – were soggy, including my passport. Grrrrrrrrrr. And yuck, as well.

So today Mr Sun (whose name and general all-round helpfulness keep making me sing the Ace of Base song Dr Sun - ‘Give me Doctor Sun, he’s my man’) was due to come round to sort out some bills with us. We’d reported the broken washing machine and he’d arranged for someone to come and repair it at the same time, when Sherry would also be here to explain the problem if required. (He also said that if it broke again they’d just get us a new one, which was a bit of a result as that’s what I wanted in the first place anyway).

They were all supposed to be here between 5 and 6pm. Which is why when the doorbell rang at lunchtime I ignored it. Now I know at least one reader who will sympathise when I admit that I was in my jammies. If anyone else is shocked, then my excuse is that I’m pregnant and don’t sleep well at night (partly because the bed in Harbin was the size of a football pitch so we’re having some trouble getting used to a normal sized one again!), so I often tend to sleep in in the morning. Anyway, if it was the washing machine people, they were too early, and if it wasn’t, then it would be someone speaking Chinese at me about something unknown. So I thought they could just come back later. Which they did. Ten minutes later. And another ten minutes after that. And again after that, each time ringing the doorbell more insistently than the time before.

On the third attempt, they started to hammer on the door as well. By now it had reached the point where I couldn’t have opened the door even if I’d wanted to, as it would have been obvious that I’d been there all along. But when they actually started to rattle the door handle to see if the door was locked I decided I’d rather not open it, as whoever was outside was clearly a psychopath. This went on for a full fifteen minutes before Peter (whom I’d phoned in a state of some alarm!) came home and let the man – who had indeed come to fix the washing machine, four hours early – in.

And then, just to round it all off, while he was here, we noticed that window cleaners were shinning down the outside of the building on ropes, and had just about reached our floor when Peter saw water pouring in through the ceiling just inside one of the windows (fortunately the one in the utility room where there’s a drain in the floor and we keep a mop & bucket anyway). When Mr Sun finally came, we mentioned this with some concern. ‘Oh that’s ok’, came the reply. ‘That won’t happen again. They only wash the windows every two years.’

Dad, if they’ve got the internet up there and you’re reading this, if I ever laughed at you then I’m sorry. I understand now. I never thought I could hate the wet stuff so much.

Now, can I hear something dripping?

Sweeping changes

Well. Tomorrow, Sunday 5th April, is my birthday. I shall be (apparently, so they tell me) 41.

Forty-one. Was a more depressing age ever invented? Like so many of its odd-number fellows, it sits uncomfortably between two even numbers each rich in cultural references. The only cultural reference point I can think of for 41 is that it was the age of the unfortunate character of Timothy, played by Ronnie Corbett, in the 80s sitcom Sorry!, which isn’t too great a role model. It was bad enough last year, when I stared and stared at all the cards on the mantlepiece with a large number on the front, wondering who on earth they could belong to as they quite clearly had nothing to do with me. But now I’m not just 40. I’m IN MY FORTIES. Last year I had to come to terms with the notion that I would be ticking a new box, the 40-49 one, on most forms from then on. Then last night I had the horrible realisation that there might even be forms with a 41-50 box which, as of tomorrow, will include me. I’m probably not even allowed another birthday party for the next nine years, and when I do have one, all my friends will be old. As well.

Here in China, this weekend also marks the annual Qingming (pronounced Ching-ming) or Tomb Sweeping festival. This is one of those ‘does-exactly-what-it-says-on-the-tin’ type of festivals when people, er, sweep tombs and generally tidy up and tend their family graves. They also make offerings at the graves in honour of their ancestors. It’s very similar in sentiment to the better-known Mexican Dia de los Muertos (though sadly without the fabby costumes, Watty & Mark!) As one of China’s few solar festivals it always falls on the 15th day after the Spring Equinox, i.e. the 4th or 5th April. Great. Just what I need when I’m feeling a bit sensitive about being middle-aged – a festival of death on my birthday.

Tomb Sweeping Festival was only designated a public holiday for the first time in 2008, when the traditional May Day ‘Golden Week’ was shortened to three days, and you get the impression that people don’t know quite what to do with it yet, especially as it falls on a weekend this year anyway. If the Scottish government ever gets around to making St Andrew’s Day a holiday like they keep threatening, the Scots will know exactly what to do – go to the pub and generally celebrate an extra day’s skiving off work – but the Chinese, as a largely workaholic nation, seem ill-at-ease with the concept of leisure time and appear to find it difficult to relax. They’re forever working at weekends to make up time and, with the exception of Chinese New Year, seem a bit confused by the idea of days off. This is no doubt why China is one of the few countries whose economy is not currently in recession, what financial problems they do have all being of external making.

Anyway, the only evidence of anything unusual going on this weekend has been the fires on street corners where people burn papers bearing blessings and gifts for their ancestors, such as we saw at New Year, only on a slightly wider scale – in Harbin anyway. For the past couple of evenings they were to be seen in every gutter, and the aftermath – in the form of piles of charcoal – was much in evidence this morning. Our ‘corner shop’ downstairs was selling bundles of brown paper specifically for the purpose. As we drove through town on our way to the airport today, there was a bit of a holiday mood - though that may have been due to the unseasonably warm spring sunshine which has made all the ice and snow disappear in the space of a couple of days – and on a road out of town which presumably led to a cemetery there was a mile-long tailback.

Then we arrived into Shanghai tonight in a downpour worthy of a Scottish summer, which would have extinguished the brightest of sacrificial flames and was distinctly non-tomb-sweeping weather. Part of the tradition involves picnicking, chatting and possibly flying kites by your family’s grave once you’ve done your sweeping, but it really wasn’t the day for that so I guess they all went home and ate the food they’d put out for the ancestors there. Apparently they only put the rubbish food like dry biscuits out on the actual graves in case ‘bad spirits’ (or very much alive scroungers, more like) help themselves to it, and save all the good stuff for indoors.

In many ways it’s a fitting conclusion to this week, which for me anyway has had a bit of an ‘end of days’ feel to it. This was my final week in our Harbin flat until the autumn, and I’ve been feeling quite emotional about it. Everything seems to be changing. Even B&Q is closing, a victim of the credit crunch, apparently. Said establishment, we found with some hilarity on our arrival in Harbin, was right on our doorstep, between our flat and Peter’s office. You’ll appreciate the comedy in this when you realise that Peter, who hates DIY with a passion (despite being, unfortunately for him, rather good at it), nearly tore his hair out having to visit our nearest branch in Edinburgh almost weekly in the run-up to our departure last year in an effort to finish our blighted bathroom refurbishments. Anyway, B&Q Harbin will remain open only as long as stocks last – which won’t be long if the swarms of locust-like bargain hunters fighting over humidifiers and buckets reduced by 20% last night were anything to go by.

I hasten to point out that I’m not particularly emotional about the closure of B&Q. I may be hormonal but it hasn’t got that bad – yet! I have however been stressed by several things. The first was trying to book a cheapish hotel in Kyoto at the height of their sakura (cherry blossom) season. After fruitless attempts via several useless websites with non-real-time booking systems, we had to grovel to Peter’s Japanese colleague to find us somewhere, after initially turning down his offer of help because he didn’t seem to believe us when we said we didn’t want to pay £275 a night.

The second was having to leave Harbin just as spring is starting in earnest after five months of grim winter. I’m gutted about this. Unlike all other migratory creatures, we are flying south for the summer. Not sure what species of swallow that makes us – not African or European, that’s for sure – maybe just perverse? Though in a supreme irony, as the infamous Harbin heating has another two weeks to go before it’s switched off, it’s been a like a sauna in our flat there this week, while in Shanghai we still need to wear winter clothes indoors and take them off when we go out!

But the worst part was having to clean the flat. Cleaning rented flats before moving out of them is something I deeply resent, especially when I then have to scrub the new one from top to bottom as I did last week because the previous (western!) inhabitants had left it caked in ingrained grime. In all my years of moving house, I’ve tried in vain to establish whether there is in fact some code of practice which states whether it should be the outgoing or the incoming tenants who do the cleaning. As an outgoer, I’ve always done it under the unspoken but ever-present threat of the Lost Deposit, only to find that the people moving out of my new place had taken this threat a lot less seriously than me – no doubt with good reason, as I’ve never heard of anyone actually losing a deposit due to poor cleaning. Of course we’re not really moving out of Harbin, but a vague threat that the landlady might want to come in some time to have a look at the place was enough for me, so I’ve dusted and hoovered and mopped (well ok, Peter mopped) all week with spectacularly bad grace.

Our Chinese colleagues, and other non-British westerners such as Big Boss (who’s Australian), can’t understand why we don’t get an ayi – a kind of maid-cum-nanny who seems to be de rigueur for all westerners in Shanghai. How do you explain to a foreigner the peculiarly British angst which surrounds the whole question of employing domestic servants, especially ones of a different (whisper it) race? It smacks so strongly of colonialism and the class system that we wring our hands in liberal anguish, convinced that by paying other people to do menial tasks which we’re quite capable of doing ourselves we’re somehow suggesting we’re socially superior to them, despite the fact that this is what goes on in workplaces every day. Couple this late-20th/early 21st century crisis of conscience with the very mid-20th century view, inculcated in us by our mothers and grandmothers, that the worst fate that could ever befall a woman is to be judged by others for having a dirty house, and you see why it becomes impossible to hire a cleaner, who by definition will see us at our worst – unless we clean up before she comes, obviously.

I grew up in the kind of home which got cleaned when – and only when – we had visitors. When we visited others’ houses they had no doubt been cleaned the day before as well. (The trick is not to do it the same morning; that way they won’t smell the polish and so will never guess.) For my mother’s benefit I must point out that this is not meant as a criticism! Quite the opposite, in fact. It was a spectacularly convenient arrangement which allowed everyone to maintain the charade that their house was immaculate at all times while not actually doing much work – though the question of the impromptu guest was always a fraught one, of course. Despite now seeing the inherent ridiculousness of this - and wondering why these people were our friends anyway if these were the criteria on which we judged each other – I have nonetheless embraced the same practices wholeheartedly in my own adult life: something which both amuses and infuriates my husband, whose own family had a much healthier take-us-as-you-find-us approach to the whole business.

So the idea of letting a Chinese woman into my house to poke about in my toilet and behind my fridge, all smiles and Ni hao’s while probably thinking ‘God these westerners are filthy heathens’ fills me with horror. Even if what she’s actually thinking is ‘Thank goodness these westerners are such filthy heathens or I wouldn’t have a job’. Or even just ‘Thank goodness I’ve got such a cushy job where all I have to do is clean up after these oddballs’. For the Chinese, you see, it is – oh so ironically – all just a question of market economics. We can pay, they want a job; what’s the problem?

So perhaps I should just count my blessings. Qingming Festival is also about celebrating spring, planting, and new life. I may be 41 in a few hours, but in a few months, by some miracle – having genuinely thought I’d left it too late – I’ll be having a baby. A sweeping change indubitably, but the most amazing one to happen to me yet. And tomorrow, as my birthday treat, we’re going to Japan: first to Tokyo for a few days, and then to Kyoto, which is a place I’ve always wanted to visit. Japan may be as near to here as going to France is from the UK, but it’s still fantastic.

Changes. Like the man says, turn and face the strain. It’s not all bad.

Knowledge, and the lack thereof

“TAXI !!”

How often have you shouted that word, or even silently raised your arm on a busy street, secure in the belief that once ensconced in that vehicle you need have no further worries and will be able to switch off for a short while, as you are conveyed efficiently to your destination? You won’t get lost. You won’t be asked any difficult questions regarding the location of or route to wherever you’re going. After all, taxi drivers know everything, right?

Edinburgh taxi drivers do. In fifteen years there I was only ever taken to the wrong place once, and that was forgivable as a lot of the streets do have very similar names. Minicab drivers in York and Southampton seem to have a pretty good grasp of things too, despite having those cities’ tortuous one-way systems to contend with. And in London, of course, all cabbies have The Knowledge.

For my non-British readers, this is a test - allegedly requiring years of study - which anyone wishing to become a black-cab driver in London must pass, and which basically involves learning the name and location of every street and landmark in the UK capital. It’s a BIG place, so the taxi drivers rightly pride themselves on this achievement – particularly as I imagine they must have to keep their ‘Knowledge’ continually updated to keep pace with changes, which is no mean feat these days.

If you’ll permit me an indulgent aside for a moment, anyone who doubts that such an encyclopedic knowledge of a giant mega-city is possible should have met my late father. He wasn’t a cab driver, but I’m sure The Knowledge would have been a breeze for him. He was born and raised in south-east London, and later worked for one of the major publishing houses as their Central London rep for many years between the 1950s and 1970s. He was extremely good at it, and as a result was on first name terms with every bookshop owner, manager or chief buyer in London, which was a great many.

A bi-product of this was that he knew the place like the proverbial back of his hand. When my friends and I started going up to London on our own as teenagers, if any of us wanted to find a specific address, no matter what the area, I had only to ask my Dad and after a minute or two’s consideration he would not only able to advise the traveller as to the quickest route by Tube, but would also draw – freehand and without recourse to reference books – a detailed and amazingly accurate pictorial map of the route on foot from station to destination, showing every turning and landmark - sometimes down to the last tree or lamp-post - with estimated distances or walking times between each.

As a result I was able to travel freely alone around London from the age of about 14 with no fear of getting lost. I’d never heard of an A to Z – my Dad’s maps were all I ever needed. I wish I’d kept some of them as they were works of art, of which he was justly proud. On one’s return home he would enquire with just a hint of a smug smile, ‘So did you find it all right?’, to which one was required to respond with glory heaped upon The Map.

The only time they were ever wrong was when some new development had occurred without his knowledge - something which, it has to be said, he always took very badly. He seemed to expect to be kept informed of all changes, however minor, to the London landscape; indeed, it’s quite possible he half expected them to be run past him first. Any alteration to his beloved native city was truly a monstrous carbuncle. During my student years he occasionally came to collect me by car from King’s Cross when I came home for the holidays, and the installation of any new roundabout or one-way system not only confused and perturbed him but also, you could tell, wounded him deeply. If I or my mother had gone to London armed with one of his maps and dared to remark casually on our return, ‘Yes, thanks, I found the place no problem, the map was great, but incidentally did you know that place you said was a bank is actually now a McDonald’s? And where you said there’d be a big tree on the corner it looked as though they’d chopped it down recently,’ all hell would break loose.

First would come a detailed interrogation to make sure that we weren’t mistaken, or making it up just to annoy him, and that we really had followed his instructions to the letter and hadn’t accidentally – or perhaps wilfully – taken a wrong turning. When at length he was satisfied that we were not either lying or congenitally stupid, the grieving process would begin.

‘McDonald’s?!’ he’d cry, in anguish. ‘What is the world coming to? Been there for years, that bank had. McDonald’s? Christ Almighty,’ and so on in this vein for some time. Or, ‘What, that lovely old tree? Gone? I can’t believe it. Lovely, it was, that tree. Chopped it down? Dear oh dear oh dear. Christ Almighty,’ and at this point would become too choked to continue and wouldn’t speak for the rest of the evening. In the end I gave up telling him. It was less painful for everyone that way.

Knowledge, you see. A powerful tool. Unless, that is, you’re a Chinese taxi driver.

Boss was heard to remark the other week that the only qualification for becoming a cab driver in Shanghai seems to be the ability to drive. To be frank, I would question even that one, but one criterion that certainly isn’t deemed necessary is knowing where anything is.

None of the taxi drivers speak English, so if you don’t speak Chinese the only way to get anywhere is to have your destination written down in Chinese characters and show this to the driver on entering the vehicle. The drill is always the same. They take your piece of paper, peer at it, slowly turn it over and read whatever’s on the back (whether this is the same thing, a different address entirely, or simply your shopping list in English), then with some encouragement from you turn it back to the correct side and read it carefully again, generally while shaking their head and muttering. They may turn to you and ask you a question. When you respond with a shrug, or a wave in the general direction in which you need to go, they mutter some more, throw your piece of paper onto the dashboard and set off, still muttering, which is disconcerting when you can recognise the word for ‘where?’ cropping up repeatedly.

One driver this week did the whole pantomime with my little address note and then turned to me and asked in Chinese which I understood perfectly, ‘Where’s that then?’. And this wasn’t some obscure side-street; our new apartment’s address is on one of Shanghai’s major thoroughfares. It’s like a London cabbie asking you where, say, Charing Cross Road is, or an Edinburgh one struggling to find Leith Walk. What did he want me to say – ‘It’s in Shanghai’, perhaps?

Once mobile, they may start off by going in completely the opposite direction, or take a wildly wrong turning anywhere en route, so you need to have your wits about you and be prepared to shout ‘No, no!’ and gesture frantically – assuming, of course, you know where the place is yourself, because if you don’t, you’re frankly buggered. The only recourse in that instance is to phone someone at your destination, explain your plight, hand the phone to the driver and get them to dictate directions in Chinese. Thank goodness for modern technology.

When they eventually get near – or what they think might be near – to where you want to go, they will slow down and proceed in a very irritating stop-start manner for a mile or so while consulting your paper every few yards. They do this even if you know you’re not there yet and keep shouting at them to go on. Just as they approach the correct place, they will put their foot down and you have to scream at them again to stop, which they will then do, even if this means screeching to a halt in the middle of a dual carriageway and doing a U-turn across several lanes of oncoming traffic.

It’s not just in Shanghai that this goes on. In Harbin, our taxi usage is mostly confined to bringing the shopping home from the supermarket, which is less than a mile away. We have our address, in Chinese, in a text message which we show to the drivers. But not one of them knows where the street is, so Peter always has to sit in the passenger seat and point left and right. In Beijing the other week, Peter was on his way to a meeting and had his cabbie actually lean out of the window while driving along and shout across to a fellow taxi driver driving alongside for directions. Ever heard of sat-nav, guys??

Maybe the trouble is that finding out where places are would involve getting a straight answer out of people, something which you’ll have gathered by now is next to impossible here. The lost taxi-driver in Beijing was only part of Peter’s woes in his attempts to get to this meeting. First of all he had tried to get the hotel reception to give him a phone number for a taxi company so that he could call a taxi to get back after the meeting, as it was out of town. The girl he asked looked a bit perplexed and went into the back office to consult with her colleagues. After a while she reappeared.

‘We will call you taxi,’ she said.

Peter explained that yes, that was fine for getting there, but how would he get back? After several repetitions of this cycle, the duty manager got on the case and offered to find a driver and negotiate with him to wait while Peter had his meeting. Clearly the concept of phoning in advance for a taxi was unheard of – indeed, as the taxis have no radios it’s hard to see how this could work. They sent a lad from the hotel into the street to flag down a taxi. Two stopped at once, only avoiding crashing into each other by one of them knocking down a cyclist, who got up and started shouting at the driver and kicking his bumper, thereby allowing the other driver to win Peter’s fare.

It was this man - who apparently resembled a hippopotamus with exceptionally large, hairy, warty ears - who had to ask other drivers for assistance en route, until Peter eventually phoned the person he was going to meet and did the hand-the-phone-to-driver thing – which in view of the warty ears was pretty brave.

On arrival at his destination, Peter disembarked and retrieving (and wiping) his phone, said to his associate, ‘Right, I’m here now. I’m at the main entrance. Where’s your office?’

‘Ah’, says associate. ‘Go out of the main door and we are round the back.’

‘Left or right?’ asks Peter.

‘We are in a building that is not yellow.’

‘Yes but do I go left or right?’

‘It is a low building.’

Giving up, he picked a direction at random, walked for a little while and then phoned again. ‘Ok, I’m standing looking at a big tower thing.’

‘Ah, you have gone too far. Go back.’

He returns to the main entrance. ‘Now I’ve gone back to where I was before.’

‘I did not see you! Look for the building that is not yellow.’

And so, having asked the guy please to come out and find him, he tried again, and on the second attempt discovered that in actual fact when he got to the tower he hadn’t gone far enough.

People say the Chinese will one day rule the world. If knowledge really is power, I don’t think we’ve got too much to worry about. Rule the world? They’d have to find it first.

Meltdown

Temperatures in Harbin on Tuesday hit a giddy 9 degrees centigrade. The result of this was that within 24 hours every trace of snow and ice had vanished from the roads and pavements, which were suddenly damp and visible for the first time in months. There was still plenty of snow around, mainly in huge blackened piles where efficient security guards (such as the ones in the building across the street from us - ours aren't quite as on the ball, though they do their best) have repeatedly piled it over the last few months, so that it now stands about four feet high all around the edges of the courtyard. There was also snow on the grassy areas, but the odd tuft of (brownish) green was even beginning to poke through there, along with a few forgotten leeks, of course.

For the whole of the last couple of weeks, with the thermometer see-sawing either side of the zero mark, things have been gradually turning to mush. I stepped on one unavoidable sheet of ice the other day, only to find it was the thin skin on a puddle and I was almost up to my ankles in dirty water. The icy pavements used not to be a hazard to walk on: the surface of the ice being quite dry, there was none of the slipperiness we generally associate with ice. All this has changed though, making walking and driving a bit more of a gingersome exercise, though fortunately there were ice-free patches in between.

But by Tuesday, like I said, suddenly we were - for all practical purposes - ice-free. People were walking about in ordinary jackets rather than huge fur coats, the sun was shining, and there was an audible dripping sound. I remembered that last year, when we were considering moving to Harbin, we used to keep a watch on the BBC Weather site to see the temperature here each week. After three months of minus 20, suddenly one week in March it was minus 10, then zero, then plus 10, in a matter of a couple of weeks. Finally, I thought, that moment has arrived once again. Yippee!

But then yesterday it snowed. And snowed. And snowed and snowed and snowed. For about seven hours. Stephen Fry may tell us that it's a myth that it can be 'too cold to snow', but I think what he probably means (and these guys seem to agree with me) is that it's possible for it to be too dry to snow. This would explain why the majority of the snowfall we've had since arriving in this neo-Siberian outpost has been in November and March - the transitional seasons which tend to be wetter than winter proper. At least that's my theory and I'm sticking to it. Whatever the case, they closed Harbin airport for several hours yesterday. Just as Peter was trying to fly back from Beijing (whither he was whisked once again not four days after returning via there from the UK!). You'd think Harbin, of all places, would have worked out a way of keeping airports open in bad weather by now, but it seems not. So he and Boss were stranded in Beijing for four hours, finally arriving home at 1am. More meltdown.

Which is what my life feels like at the moment. This has been a week of relentless stress regarding our new flat in Shanghai. God I hate China sometimes. You can't get a straight answer out of anybody. Ask them a question and they'll just fob you off or even blatantly lie through their teeth to tell you what you want to hear, hoping you won't pursue the matter. Then if you do, they'll deny all knowledge of the conversation. Anything which avoids them having to actually DO something. This makes me want to SCREAM!!!!!

An example: one of the items on our carefully compiled list of 'must-have' requirements for our new apartment was that we wanted broadband internet. I need to blog!! Oh, and Peter occasionally needs to work from home but that's obviously far less important! So, when I went to look round some apartments the other week, this was more or less the FIRST question I asked in every place I went into. There were 6 in total, and the answers went something like this.

Apt 1: 'No, you will have to instal it yourselves. It's very inconvenient.'
Apts 2 & 3: 'We don't know. We can find out. Don't worry.'
Apts 4 [the one we're ha ha supposedly moving into this weekend] and 5: (Slightly irritatedly) 'We can ask the landlord to instal it if you want it. It won't be a problem. Don't worry.'
Apt 6: 'It's included!' (Yippee - except that the apartment in question had a bathroom the size of a postage stamp, and so was no good).

In other words, the person we gave the list to had made no effort to check in advance whether any of these apartments actually had this 'must-have requirement'. Having decided on a place nonetheless, we then had a friend in Shanghai undertake negotiations for us with the landlord's agent, regarding length of lease and so on. In our email to her we specifically mentioned getting the internet connected as a pre-requisite. She specifically didn't mention anything about it in her reply, so assuming all was well, we went ahead and got the contract signed and paid a deposit plus three months' rent up front, which is what you have to do in the face of constant threats that they'll give the place to someone else if you don't.

So this week, with the contract due to start on Saturday, we send a list to the Shanghai office of minor things we want sorted out and finalised before we move in. One of which was 'get the internet connected please'.

'The agent says you never mentioned the internet', comes back the reply.

WHAT????!!!! I seem to have mentioned NOTHING ELSE. Anyway, we're mentioning it NOW, so please do it. What's the problem? Yet this was on Monday, and as yet we've received no answer as to whether this apartment for which we have paid and which we're committed to moving into will have any form of internet connection. Despite, I repeat, this being a bloody MUST-HAVE requirement.

Oh, and as if that weren't enough, it turns out that the giant great satellite dish attached to the balcony (also one of the big draws of this apartment after 6 months of CCTV9 !) 'doesn't work'. Er, why not? Why's it there then? Should the landlords not ensure that things are working before putting the place up for rent? What else will turn out not to be working when we arrive?

And all they keep saying is 'Don't worry. It will be OK.'

AARRRGGHHHHH !!!!!! I'm in meltdown.

A moving story

So plans are underway for our impending move to Shanghai. There are various good reasons for this, the main one being that I refuse to give birth in Harbin where hospital provision is somewhat basic and monolingual Chinese, and I won’t be allowed to fly after the end of April-ish, so to attend a hospital in Shanghai I need to be living there. Once the baby’s born in July I will be free to travel, but the baby needs a passport before it’s allowed on a plane, and a visa before it’s officially allowed to live in China – a bit of a joke when you consider it’ll never have been anywhere else – and I’d like it to have had a few vaccinations before I take it on a Chinese flight. So we reckoned about 6 months in Shanghai was the minimum, and might be fun anyway.

We’re quite attached to the hotel which we always stay in when we go there, despite an entertainingly patchy room service which frequently results in breakfast turning up inconveniently late or early and almost always with the wrong cutlery (ever tried eating cornflakes with a knife and fork?). But six months in such a place would not only be horrifically expensive but would drive us (me) insane, not to mention the unfortunate other guests who had to live next door to our screaming newborn (!), so we’ve been forced to find what we have to keep remembering to call an ‘apartment’ to move into.

When I say ‘move’, it’s not so much a move as an ultra-decadent bid to have not one but two homes in China (as well as one in the UK, of course), due to the fact that a) Peter’s job – though do-able from Shanghai – is really based in Harbin and will require him to be here at least two days a week, b) we can’t quite bear to commit ourselves to either leaving our Harbin flat or to leaving Shanghai when the essential period is over, and c) unknown to us, a two-year lease had been signed on the Harbin flat - sorry, apartment. So we did the maths and worked out we could just afford to keep two places going for six months, without having to resort to the elaborate subletting plan proposed by Boss but which, we were told in no uncertain terms by Kevin, our Harbin landlords Would Not Like.

That was the easy bit.

Now, anyone reading this who’s known me for a long time will have an idea of my record on house moves. For the rest of you, you could say it’s, well, What I Do. Some people throw themselves into their careers; some excel at sport; others collect stamps. I move house. I think at the last count it was 22 times, four of which occurred before the age of seven and the remainder after the age of 18. One friend always used to joke that she needed a separate address book just for me. The total could possibly be more, depending on what exactly you classify as a move. For example, if I moved from one part of a student hall of residence to another (about 6 times, I think), does that count? Or if I stayed with parents or friends while in transit from one home to another (at least twice)?

Whatever the case, you’d think by now I’d find the whole thing a breeze. Truthfully, I used to enjoy it. Revel, almost. But as time goes on, to my intense surprise I’m finding the experience increasingly stressful – something which I think has less to do with my age and more to do with the fact that I seem subconsciously to find it necessary to make each move more difficult for myself than the last. I feel as though I’m trapped in a giant computer game called House Move 3 or something, progressing to a higher and higher level each time.

I’ve moved into houses, flats, bungalows, lodgings and hotel rooms. I’ve moved out of basements into third floor flats and vice versa. I’ve squeezed the contents of an entire flat into a room the size of a cupboard. I’ve moved to new towns – and even a new country – with no idea where I was going to live, and I’ve turned up at a new home I’d just bought to find that due to a hugely complicated mix-up, my key wouldn’t work and I had to find a locksmith and persuade him that I did live there, honest.

I’ve transported my belongings by car, van, train, plane, ferry, fleet of taxis and on foot, trundling them to a new place a few streets away in a supermarket trolley. I’ve moved in blistering heat and torrential rain (the latter several times – although snow will, I think, be a first). I’ve scarcely ever called upon the services of removers, relying generally on family, friends, grudging colleagues, a grumpy ‘man with a van’ driver who didn’t stop complaining because I hadn’t managed to drum up any other helpers and it ‘wasn’t part of his job to carry boxes’, and a friend who attempted to drive a van from York to Edinburgh without bothering to look at a map first, and took us via Redcar.

I’ve moved from Devon to Cornwall, Cornwall to Bristol, Bristol to London/Kent, Kent to York, York back to Kent again (and several repeats of this cycle while I was a student), then to France for a year, then back to York, then to the Shetland Islands for a brief spell, then from York to Edinburgh where I managed to stay put for a bit, then to Southampton (via Kent), then lived half in Southampton and half in Edinburgh before moving back to Edinburgh properly, and then finally to China. I must have covered more miles than Marco Polo.

I’ve done moves which involved getting things from four locations into one and vice versa. I hardly possess an item that hasn’t been in storage at some point, either containerised or in an obliging mother or friend’s loft for several years. I’ve carried collections of suitcases totalling considerably more than my own body weight on trains up and down the East Coast main line hundreds of times. I’ve organised a complicated logistical exercise which involved driving my things from Edinburgh to York by van and then transferring them to my mother’s car which took them on to Kent. I’ve travelled by train from north to south and back with plants, a large hi-fi system, and even a cat in a wicker basket.

I’ve moved in with total strangers, made friends, lost friends, gained and lost lovers and made enemies. My flatmates have been male, female, straight, gay, young (the youngest being a baby of 4 months) or not-so-young, rich, poor, tidy, untidy, employed, unemployed, lovely, tolerable, and unbearable. I’ve lived with English, Scots, Irish, Spaniards (lots and lots of Spaniards), Danes, New Zealanders, and even a one-legged Welsh-speaking Glaswegian called Davy Jones (seriously).

I’ve moved into a place where the previous occupant’s toenail clippings were still embedded in my bedroom carpet – and there was no hoover. I've lived with a girl who kept the toilet roll in a locked cupboard, and with a Tory lawyer with whom I bickered from Day One. There have been insomniacs, people who managed to sleep through deafening music at 3am, people on odd diets and followers of curious religions. I’ve argued ferociously over heating, bills, and whose turn it was to buy or clean things, and had a lovely Spanish flatmate who used to sell me a few of her cool customised clothes every time the phone bill came in, and I fell for it every time. I even lived by myself for a few years and loved it.

And in all of this I’ve only managed to lose one box of books, and have acquired various useful items, a couple of best friends, and a wealth of life experience quite possibly unparallelled among those I know, and for which I shall be eternally grateful. And now I’m married and I love that too. Better than anything.

But I truly thought I’d reached the highest level of House Move 3 with our move to China. We had to sort our extensive collection of possessions (and believe me, the whole thing gets SO much more complicated once another person’s things are thrown into the equation, particularly when that person is a worse hoarder than I am!) into what we would take with us, what we would ship out for later, what we’d leave behind for our tenant, what we’d throw out and what we’d put into storage. We had piles for each category around the flat, which wasn’t easy as we were short of space to begin with. Things got transferred from one pile to another and back again. My problems with getting someone to transport them to China I’ve documented previously. So let’s just say that it was extremely stressful, and once we’d found somewhere to live in Harbin and our things had arrived, the one thing I DID NOT want to do was move again until we had to go home.

You’ll have gathered that my pregnancy was, if not exactly unplanned, then certainly unexpected, and so I find myself now with no alternative but to uncover some sort of hidden bonus feature on House Move 3 where you can have two homes in China simultaneously, which sounds good but involves new challenges not previously encountered in the main game. These include:

One - Trying to find a suitable apartment in a city a thousand miles away a month or two before you want to move in, in a country where everything is done at the last minute and any properties you look round are always available NOW and the concept of holding it for you is an alien one.

Two - Compiling a list of our requirements to give to a Chinese speaker in the office (so that she could make a shortlist of apartments for us to see), carefully divided into ‘must-haves’ and ‘nice to haves’, only for her to ignore most of the items on the list and send us to lots of quite unsuitable places which maybe filled one or two of the criteria.

Three - Trying to negotiate a lease of unorthodox length (which has turned out to be 8 months in practice) when the landlords just want to make as much money out of westerners as they possibly can.

Four - Getting people in the office to take some initiative when it comes to paying deposits, signing contracts and so forth, when they’re terrified to do anything without explicit instructions from you in words of one syllable, lest they get it wrong somehow and thus lose face.

Five - Sorting all our stuff AGAIN into what to take and what to leave in Harbin, complicated by the fact that Peter will spend several days a week here, and by the fact that I’ll be forbidden from flying so won’t be able to come back for things myself, so I’ll have to be able to tell him the exact location of anything I want brought down.

AND by the fact that Chinese landlords don’t provide bedding or kitchen equipment in their apartments so that we had to buy everything from scratch when we moved in here, and will now have to either take half of all this stuff with us, or else buy everything (including kettle, vacuum cleaner, pillows, plates, pans, etc) all over again. Which of course means we’ll have two of everything when we come back. Three, if you count all the stuff back home. I’m trying to learn to breathe deeply and not raise my blood pressure too much!

I’m so looking forward to the release of House Move 4. That’s where you have to do everything I’ve described above - WITH A BABY.

Blowing hot and cold

Well. I did have two ‘followers’ on my blog, and now it seems I’ve lost one. Something I said?

How can I possibly feel snubbed by someone I’ve never met? I know I never wrote and said hello, for which I apologise – I kept meaning to, honestly. Or is it the prospect of my heading off to Shanghai (temporarily, I repeat, temporarily) for reproductive purposes and thus failing to fulfil the ‘to Siberia’ part of my remit? Either way, just to disappear seems a bit harsh.

While we’re on the subject, thanks to everyone whom I know is reading the blog silently, but I’d love to hear your comments occasionally or see your wee smiling faces (or even that spooky blank head thing) as ‘followers’ on my dashboard. Just to make me feel loved. And thanks to those who do comment (just so you guys don’t start getting huffy as well!); it’s much appreciated.

But back to Siberia. You may remember the saga of our heating. It wasn’t on, we were cold when it wasn’t outside; then it was on, it was freezing outside and we were sweltering hot. Then it went cold in the flat suddenly one weekend about a month ago and we thought, ‘Uh-oh, looks like switch-off day has come’ – but it was a false alarm due, presumably, to a temporary malfunction which was fixed within a day. All of which was totally beyond our control.

Or so we thought.

Last week we happened to be chatting with Peter’s colleague Wildon, a veritable Mr ‘Let-me-just-make-a-couple-of-phone-calls’ who knows everything and everybody and can sort out things you’d never believe possible. We were complaining of the overpowering heat in our flat, especially in view of the fact that a) the temperature in Harbin is now occasionally reaching a balmy 5 (yes, five!) degrees, and more importantly b) the recommended temperature for a baby’s bedroom is 16 – 20 degrees, and if we couldn’t get ours below 27, I could see myself mounting a nightly vigil by the cot lest Baby should expire from overheating or dehydration.

The latter, incidentally, is another problem, necessitating slathering oneself in E45 lotion and having a humidifier constantly belching out cold steam vapours. We first saw these when we came to Shanghai last year and couldn’t understand why people had kettles (often in the shape of Mickey Mouse or similar) boiling continuously on their desks when it was sweltering hot outside! The idea of it being too dry indoors is a difficult concept to get your head around when you’re used to living in soggy Britain where preventing damp is a constant battle. But here we can leave wet washing draped over the back of the furniture to dry overnight. In fact it makes life more comfortable if you do. Very weird.

So anyway, we asked Wildon what date the heating would go off. He reckoned about mid April – 6 months after it came on. Makes sense, but we blanched at the prospect – by April it’s more like 10 – 15 degrees. Sure you can open the windows then, but still.

‘But’, said Wildon, ‘I think you can control the temperature.’

‘Noooooo!’, we said.

‘Usually there is a control somewhere in the kitchen’, he insisted.

‘Where?’ we asked in disbelief. ‘We’ve never seen it. I don’t think so.’

‘Let me just make a couple of phone calls,’ he said.

And sure enough, the following day he spoke to the management of our building and came back with detailed instructions – there may even have been a diagram – as to exactly where these controls were located, what they looked like and how to operate them. And, sure enough, when we looked deep in the recesses of an obscure cupboard in our kitchen, there they were, just as he described. It seems there’s a master lever for adjusting the temperature of the whole flat, and individual taps controlling each room.

NOW they tell us. Kevin did have the good grace to look a little sheepish, seeing as we’ve been going on at him about the heat for months and even had him over here a couple of weeks ago trying to fathom out our quite unfathomable air conditioning system.

Unfortunately what there wasn’t was any clue as to which control was for which room, so we decided to experiment with the master lever. Peter turned it as far as it would go without removing a shelf, and we waited. And waited. Twelve hours later the thermometer still said 27°, so he took the shelf out and turned it a bit more, and we waited again.

Next day it was 26°, so he hit the lever with a shoe until it would turn no further. This time, within a few hours, the temperature still read 26° but the heat which we can normally feel from the floor was notable by its absence. We concluded he’d actually turned it off, and that the ambient warmth we could feel was just residual build-up due to four months of super-heatedness and the fact that the flat’s very well insulated (if you ignore the window with the broken catch which we’ve had to both tape and glue shut). So he pushed the lever back up to the first position he’d tried, and we waited once more.

On Monday I was warm. It said 25°. I had to put a cardigan on in the evening but that was ok. Tuesday I woke up feeling a touch chilly. I put on a long-sleeved top indoors for the first time in ages. Then Peter left for the UK. I tentatively suggested turning the heating back to its original full setting (as it was still minus 10° at night) and trying to work out instead which dial controlled the future baby’s room, but he said we should ‘let it settle’.

On Tuesday night I needed a thicker cardigan. This was quite enough settling as far as I was concerned. I went to the exciting new controls and tried to turn the lever anti-clockwise to turn it back up. Could I budge it? Not one millimetre. As if it had never been designed to move. On Wednesday morning I actually had cold feet, and by Wednesday evening I was in a serious winter woolly and starting to worry how I’d get through the week. The floor felt cold. I felt cold. The thermometer, dammit, still read 25°. But no way was it 25°.

Action stations were called for. I pulled the shelf out of the cupboard so as to get a better purchase on the thing, donned Peter’s ski gloves, and manœuvering (sp?) my little pregnant self into a most ungainly position on the floor and half inside the cupboard, I gripped the top of the pipe with both hands and pushed on the lever with both thumbs and all of my inconsiderable force. At the third attempt it moved a centimetre or two. After a couple of minutes to get my breath back I tried again, and after another two or three attempts moved it a fraction more, so that it’s now just short of what it originally was.

The conclusion? The thermometer is creeping back up. I’m sweating again, but not as much as before, and anyway I don’t care. Baby will be fine, we’ll find the control for that room, buy a free-standing air conditioning unit if we have to, and humidify the place within an inch of its life.

I do so wish I was going to be here in the summer. Summer in Harbin is lovely, but by the time I come back we’ll have to start this whole bloody heating rigmarole all over again. Anyway, what's the point of making it centrally controlled if it's, well, not?

Let’s just hope Shanghai’s air conditioning systems are more user-friendly.

International events

So, the 24th Winter Universiade has been and gone. The closing ceremony – a pile of boring speeches and lots of people in white floating around, mainly - was last night. We couldn’t get to Pizza Hut because of it! It’s an outrage.

Anyway, as promised to myself I went to one event last Sunday, namely some figure skating (ice dance original dance and pairs free skating to be precise). A bit girly, I’m afraid, and not my first choice as I prefer more exciting events like short-track speed skating or that thing with the tea-tray that I mentioned before, but needs must when you’re short of time and Chinese language skills and the pavements are all covered in ice and snow. Still, apart from an office outing to the races I’d never been to a live sporting event before, so I reckoned it would be an experience.

It was.

You know how I told you Harbin was hoping to bid for the 2014 Winter Olympics? It turns out I was wrong and that should have been 2018. Well, sorry to break it to you, my dear Harbiner friends, but maybe you should make it, like, 2068? Perhaps that would give you enough time to work out what’s actually involved in hosting an international event.

The key word here is ‘international’. Now I’m the first to admit I’ve been lazier than a narcoleptic sloth when it comes to making any attempt to learn Chinese. In fact I’ve made none. I can say more or less the same things now as I could 6 months ago, namely ‘Hello’, ‘Goodbye’, ‘Thank you’, ‘Receipt please’ (very important!), ‘Here’ (to taxi drivers), ‘Where is it?’ (not anything specific, so not that helpful really), and occasionally if I really put my mind to it I can manage ‘I don’t understand’, which we’ve proved is more useful than Peter’s ‘I don’t speak Chinese’ said in perfect Chinese, because they never believe him! This is entirely my own fault. I know this.

But you’d think, wouldn’t you, that if you’ve got several thousand foreign athletes and their entourages coming to your city, and you’re therefore expecting some foreign spectators, and you’ve gone to the trouble of creating an English version of the website for the event, that there might have been some attempt to make the thing accessible to non-Chinese speakers? I’m thinking along the lines of maybe some signage in English? English-speaking volunteers to assist the confused, à la Beijing Olympics, that sort of thing?

No.

And you’d probably imagine that if said English website appears to have a booking facility on it - albeit one without any means of payment, but that’s understandable in a cash-based economy where few people use credit cards – that you would maybe inform the ticket office that people might be turning up with order numbers taken from this website, expecting to collect pre-booked tickets, as promised.

No.

And you might even, in a radical move, make the location of said ticket office prominent, or at the very least let your staff operating in other parts of the venue nearby know where it is, in case anyone asks. And make sure these staff speak English, in case ditto.

No.

And indeed make the entrance to the venue itself obvious. And have concession stands selling food (western as well as Chinese, maybe – you know, just hot-dogs or something, I’m not asking for the moon here). And a well-signposted – no, let’s say several well-signposted – souvenir shops or stalls, with English-speaking staff. Oh and have English-speaking staff in the ticket office, just in case the non-Chinese-speaking would-be spectators should ever stumble across it.

No, no, no and no.

Here’s how it went.

I go on the website and book a ticket (so I think), at the end of which transaction it gives me an order number. We’ve never got around to buying a printer for the house here so I write the order number down on a piece of paper. I am told to bring this order number, and my passport, to the ticket office at the International Conference Centre to collect my ticket. I had planned to do this in advance of the actual event, but as the skating was to take place at the same venue, and as Peter pointed out that the Chinese don’t expect to plan anything in advance, I was persuaded to wait until the day of the competition itself before venturing forth.

So last Sunday afternoon I duly tramp through the snow to the place where the Conference Centre is (next to our supermarket), only to realise I don’t actually know where the entrance is. I search for signs either to the event or to the ticket office. There are none, but some red LCD lettering above a couple of doors indicates that the adjoining hotel is indeed something to do with the Winter Universiade. Avoiding the one which appears to be for delegates only, I approach the other door. This is blocked by several security guards, none of whom appear to be older than 14 as is the norm here, larking around in the doorway. On seeing me, they look at each other and after a moment’s whispering they laughingly push forward the only one who can speak any English. (This is also quite a common reaction we get.)

‘May I help you?’ he says haltingly.

‘Yes’, I reply. ‘Could you tell me where the ticket office is please?’

‘Ticket office…’ he repeats wonderingly. He thinks a moment, then points towards the ‘delegates’ door. ‘This way please’.

‘Here?’ I reply in some scepticism, but he seems adamant, so off I go.

It only takes a second to work out I’m in the wrong place. There’s a red carpet, security screening, a desk with information packs, uniformed attendants with security passes around their necks. This is clearly not the place for Joe Public.

One chap springs forward and says in apparently fluent English, ‘Good afternoon madam. May I check your card please?’, indicating his security pass.

‘No, I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I don’t have a card. I just want to pick up a ticket. Could you please tell me where to go?’

‘Ticket….’, he repeats, just as wonderingly as the first chap. He looks around helplessly for a minute, then urgently beckons a colleague across. This chap really does speak a little English, so I try again.

‘Ah,’ says Chap 2. ‘You go out of this door and you turn, ah, right? Yes, right. You will see hotel called the Hua Ha Hotel’ (turns to friend) ‘Hua Ha Hotel?’ (Friend shrugs). He continues, ‘You can collect ticket here’.

There is now only about 10 minutes to go before the skating starts. I repeat these instructions and thank him. Retracing my steps past the first door, I go round the corner and come upon an obscure and unlikely-looking door, with a very small, indistinct and ambiguous sign which could possibly be interpreted as meaning one can purchase tickets inside. The door is virtually impossible to open but I fight my way in.

Now maybe I’ve been spoilt by living in Edinburgh, but when I’m told to go to a box office to collect a ticket booked online, I imagine something like the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Box Office. A long but patient roped-off queue; banks of computers manned by hyper-efficient staff calling ‘Next’ and turning over thousands of customers in an hour by printing off tickets in batches thanks to their state-of-the-art computer system.

Guess what? No.

This ticket office turns out to be one tiny, dingy room with one tiny, dingy computer, manned by one harassed girl and a bloke who looks like he doesn’t work there but has just dropped by to chat to his pal and is watching with interest while she does her job, and occasionally trying to help despite not having a clue what he’s doing (another common set-up in Chinese shops). A group of excited Chinese are gathered around Girl with Computer, one man waving a bunch of tickets and all shouting.

I hang back and attempt to wait while they resolve their dispute, but after a minute or two, Girl with Computer’s Helpful Friend spots me and beckons me forward. I present my order number. He stares at it in some perplexity.

After a while, the excitement of there being a westerner in the shop distracts the shouting group from whatever other excitement had been preoccupying them, and the hubbub dies down. Helpful Friend shows my paper to Girl. She grabs it with both hands and stares at it. She starts to follow the numbers with her finger, muttering under her breath and shaking her head in utter incomprehension as though I had given her a scroll in ancient Aramaic. I attempt to explain. She asks me something. Not knowing what else to do, I present my passport as instructed by the website. She checks this with a little more confidence, thanks me and hands it back. Having thus, apparently, concluded our business, she returns her attention to the shouters. We have reached an impasse.

After a couple of minutes, seeing I am still waiting, Helpful Friend tries again to decipher my paper but is hampered by the fact that he has taken it from me upside-down. I turn it round and try again to explain what I want. Eventually a woman from the shouting group leans on my shoulder and asks me something urgently. I shrug. She runs into a back office and drags out a young woman with long, highlighted, fluffy bunches in her hair which exactly match her long, highlighted fur coat. She has her arm round this girl and is laughing and shouting something at her in an encouraging manner. She pushes her forward.

‘Can I help you?’ says Fluffy Bunches.

‘Oh yes please!’ I exclaim in relief. ‘I booked a ticket on the computer. This is my order number. I just want to collect the ticket and I was told I could get it here.’

She, too, grabs the paper with both hands and stares and stares at it. ‘Online?’ she says.

‘Yes!’ I cry, ‘I booked it online!’ but still she stares.

‘But, what is the date?’ she asks eventually.

‘Today’, I say in some desperation. ‘Now!’

‘Now? Figure skating?’

‘Yes!’ I reply. At last we’re getting somewhere.

But she’s still frowning and staring at the paper. ‘But, how much do you want?’ she asks.

I think for a minute. How much do I want? Not much really, just the love of my husband, the assured safety and health of those I love, world peace, enough money to live on comfortably without ever having to work again, maybe a big house in the country, a cat would be nice…before I realise what she means is How many do I want.

‘Oh’, I reply. ‘One. One ticket.’ I hold up one finger for emphasis and smile pleadingly.

She turns to Girl with Computer. ‘Blah blah-blah blah blah blah blah’ (indicating me) ‘blah blah, blah, blah blah blah-blah’ (indicating computer and waving vaguely in outside direction), ‘blah blah blah blah. Blah.’ (facial expressions clearly implying, ‘Go on, go on, go on, just do her a favour, for me, eh?’) ‘Blah-blah. You pay cash?’ (Me, startled), ‘Yes, I’ll pay cash’, ‘Blah blah blah blah-blah. One hundred and fifty. Here is your ticket.’

‘Oh thank you!’ I say. ‘But, where do I go?’

‘Please, follow me!’ she says. The woman who fetched her seems to find this highly amusing and embraces her again, repeating ‘Follow me! A-ha-ha-ha-ha! Follow me! Ha ha ha!!’ Meanwhile I’m attempting to pay for my hard-won ticket while she tries to drag me out of the door, saying ‘Let’s go, let’s go!’ I just about manage to hand over my 150 RMB to Laughing Woman, who hands it to Girl with Computer, and thank everyone, whereupon they all happily resume shouting and we make our exit.

It turns out that by pure chance Cassie (for such is my new friend’s name) is also going to see the figure skating. She leads me outside and down the steps into the shopping centre, which seems to be the wrong way, but I dutifully follow. We are accompanied by her friend who walks the whole considerable distance backwards in front of us taking hundreds of photos of us both, even after Cassie asks her to stop. She pauses to buy some Chinese flags, and gives me one. We go through the shopping centre and walk up the escalator which is never switched on and appears to go nowhere, at the top of which we meet up with Cassie’s boyfriend, bearing bags of bread.

After about a half-mile trek we join up with the entrance where the rest of the public (99.99% of them Chinese, I wonder why!) are filing in from outside. A guard lifts a barrier to let us through. We go through security like at an airport. After about another half-mile we reach the auditorium and Cassie tells me which area I can find my seat in. I thank her profusely and tell her, truthfully, that I could never have found it without her. ‘It is my pleasure,’ she replies in great seriousness.

My issues did not end here. There was the health & safety issue (trailing wires everywhere, a large wooden ramp half-covering a staircase for no apparent reason and over which I had to climb, thus nearly pitching head-first onto the ice rink), the seat numbering issue (that in which I was told to sit bearing no obvious relation to the number on my ticket), the lack of food & drink issue, and the souvenir stall issue, which involved queueing to get a number which you then took to another desk to get your goods, but not being able to find out the price of anything before joining the long queue – it seems the Chinese can queue to get in a queue, but not at any other time.

But the skating was good, if a little riddled with falling-over mishaps. It turned out that everyone had come to see two particularly good Chinese pairs skaters who were streets ahead of everyone else and won by miles. The crowd were the most partisan I’ve ever heard, cheering wildly whenever anybody Chinese did anything, and pretty much ignoring everyone else. After the Chinese Pairs pair had won, everybody left (including me, it must be said, but mainly because I was cold and hungry and Peter was due home from a business trip), leaving the unfortunate male solo skaters to compete in front of a virtually empty auditorium.

So a fun time was had, but not quite in the way I expected. And the Winter Olympics? Maybe next century.

Stop Press!

Talking of international events, we have a little one of our own to tell you about, for those of my readers who haven’t yet been privy to this information. In July we will be bringing a new small international person into the world. Yes I’m 21 weeks pregnant, and planning to give birth in Shanghai – hence our frequent visits there for the past couple of months, for me to attend a western clinic.

Being pregnant in Harbin has given rise to some interesting experiences, such as trying to buy a pregnancy test in a Chinese chemist (I ended up drawing a fat stick-person with a question mark over their head!) and a scary visit to a Chinese state-run maternity hospital. So we opted for Shanghai where you get English-speaking doctors and we know lots of people who can help us out. We’ll be decamping to live there for 6-8 months from the end of March.

Which leaves me with a dilemma, blog fans. My blog is called ‘From Scotland to Siberia’, and I’ll be deserting Siberia for much warmer climes for a while. I wish I could do it the other way round – summer in Harbin and winter in Shanghai would be SO much more pleasant, weather-wise – but Baby (and airline regulations) won’t let me.

So can you forgive me if I write about Shanghai instead for a bit? Peter will still be making frequent visits up north so he can report back. And with my blogging friend at Living the Hai Life about to return to Blighty, maybe I can fill her gap a little. So don’t desert me, please. Shanghai is fun. And we’ll be back in Siberia in the autumn!

Yes

There is not a banana to be had, anywhere in Harbin.

Not since before Chinese New Year – about three or four weeks. Not in our usual large supermarket, not in the other smaller supermarket where I fought someone for the last bunch the other week, not in the corner-shop type place downstairs from our flat. Two weeks ago we even went for a meal in a posh hotel and I ordered banoffee pie for pudding (I know, I know), and was told apologetically that they couldn’t do it, and now I see why.

What’s all that about then?

I know they’ve got an extremely long way to come – not the most right-on of fruits from a food miles perspective, I grant you – but that’s never seemed to be a problem here before. Is there a worldwide shortage? Did we miss banana day or something?

It’s very distressing. I can’t think of more than about a day that’s elapsed in the last five years without me eating at least one banana. They’re a staple element of mine and Peter’s diets, so much so that we both tend to carry an EB (Emergency Banana) with us at all times.

We can get apples, pears, kiwi fruit, strawberries.

But yes, we have none.

I don’t feel like singing about it. But just in case you do…..

Traffic calming

You're going to love this one.

Tonight is the opening ceremony of the 24th Winter Universiade or student winter games (sort of like a mini winter Olympics for, obviously, students) which is being held in Harbin. China is keen to make a success of this in the hope that it will help them win the bid for the proper Winter Olympics in 2014. (They bid for 2010 and I think maybe 2002 as well but lost out.)

I'm quite excited about this as I love winter sports. Watching them, that is - daring to walk along an icy pavement is about as close as I'll ever come to actually doing any winter sports. I have no idea why I suddenly developed this interest, which began in January 1992 when I was an unemployed new graduate with nothing better to do than watch the Winter Olympics on TV. Prior to that my sport-watching had been pretty much confined to Wimbledon and occasionally as a child bonding with my Dad over cricket or snooker or some such thing. Oh and the infamous Seb Coe- and Imran Khan-fancying phases of 1983-4, but the least said about those, the better! Gimme a break, I was 15.

So anyway, I was hoping to go and see a few things, but a lot of it is actually happening at the ski resort a long way from Harbin, plus we have to go the Shanghai again next week so will miss most of it. Sadly my favourite event, the luge (the thing where someone slides head-first round a bobsleigh track very very fast on what looks like a tea-tray - utterly insane) doesn't seem to be included. So I might go and see some skating, which is possibly the least interesting but involves the least effort on my part.

Both the skating and the opening ceremony are taking place at the conference centre which happens to be about 10 minutes walk from our flat. Right next to the supermarket where we do our shopping, in fact. And like I said, the opening shenanigans is tonight. The authorities, no doubt rightly, anticipate a greatly increased volume of traffic on the roads.

Now stop a minute to think what would happen in the UK in this instance. They'd close a few roads for a few hours, wouldn't they? Inconvenient, possibly, but equally so for everyone, and largely avoidable if you know when and where not to go.

Here's what they've decided to do here.

Today, cars are only allowed onto the streets of Harbin if their registration ends in an even number. (Mr Li's ends in an odd number, hence he's unable to pick Peter up from the airport tonight.)

Can you imagine how that would go down in Edinburgh?

I'm weeping with mirth just thinking about it.

Bliss

I hardly dare say this, but after three weeks, the firecrackers have finally - whisper it - stopped.

There was one final night of sheer deafening bombardment on Monday, which was 'Lantern Festival', the last official night of the lunar new year celebrations, which falls on the first full moon following the first new moon (hope you're following this). This was complete with not only the biggest full moon in 52 years or something, but also proper fireworks - pretty ones, not just those that go bang. Of course they set them off dangerously near to buildings, as before. In Beijing the staff of CCTV apparently even managed to set fire to their own brand-new building, which would be amusing if it wasn't for the fact that a firefighter got killed in the ensuing blaze.

The noise here went on until about 2am and we thought, 'Oh thank God, from tomorrow it's illegal for them to set these bloody things off for another whole year'. But of course, there were one or two chancers who set some more off on Tuesday, either because they had a few left and just wanted to get one in under the wire, or because they were terminally stupid and didn't know what day it was, I presume.

But by yesterday there was blissful, beautiful, wonderful, heavenly, SILENCE, and the men with brooms who sweep up snow are busy sweeping vast quantities of ash onto the snow so that there are piles of grey stuff everywhere. Not that there's much snow left now since, as of last week some time, it's officially 'spring' and even made it to - wait for it - zero degrees one day!! We nearly got our bikinis out.

It's a shame though; I used to like fireworks - when you only ever got to see (and hear) them TWO NIGHTS A YEAR at the most. But after three whole weeks of being woken up by huge explosions at 8am every day - especially Sundays - and often having them either go on all evening, or else lull us into a false sense of security by being quiet until midnight and THEN starting, I have to say I shall miss them like a hole in the head.

Which is what it felt like sometimes.

Hidden Harbin

Desperate to escape his family by the fifth day of the enforced holiday, one of Peter's colleagues phoned the other day and offered to take us out for a drive. 'I will show you some sights', he said.

We were expecting a tour of Harbin's better-known tourist landmarks - St Sophia Church (seen it), the Flood Monument (ditto), Central Street (Russian shops, Russian bars and more Russian shops), and maybe a few more ice sculptures, seeing as they're everywhere - but what we got was something altogether more surprising.

The combination of China's culture being so ancient, and yet most of its historical cities having been virtually razed to the ground and turned into concrete jungles in the 1960s, makes it easy to forget that Harbin is possibly its youngest city. Springing from nothing at the turn of the 20th century when the Russians came to build the Trans-Siberian Railway (or the North-East China Railway, as they would have it here), Harbin is barely more than 100 years old. What's more, much of the Art Nouveau Russian-built architecture has survived, albeit often in a run-down state.

Our pal showed us Harbin's two oldest hotels - both quite unremarkable from the outside, but inside a glittering reconstruction of how they must have looked in their early 20th century heyday. Both are still functioning hotels but seem quite happy for tourists to come in off the street and peek about. The first, the Post Hotel, was apparently the grandest destination in the city in the 1920s and 30s, much frequented by expats, and has a brilliant display in the foyer of all the artefacts left behind by (or otherwise purloined from!) said expats, who seemed to have been of a dizzying array of nationalities from Jewish to Japanese, Italian, Portuguese, British and German, as well as Russian and American. All the objects have been scrubbed and polished and restored to their original state, and provide a fascinating insight into the lives of wealthy business people at the time, even if the well-intentioned Chinese curators seem to have had trouble identifying some of them (such as a silver bed-warming pan described as 'Tableware used by the British'!). The hotel has many original features and retains an Art Deco style in its decor. (Sorry, I'm starting to sound like an estate agent.)

The second hotel, whose name I sadly forget, is Harbin's oldest (built in 1901) and has a marble staircase and its original copper revolving door from that era. Again it's succeeded in keeping its period feel through careful restoration, and reminded us of some of the Art Nouveau public buildings in Prague - and it's not often you can say that about anything in China! It too had a foyer exhibition, just photos this time, which showed, among other things, that the Emperor Puyi (the 'Last Emperor' of cinematic fame) stayed there during his years in exile.






As well as seeing Harbin's synagogue, its huge blue mosque,





the seat of Qing dynasty government (note puff of smoke from exploding firecracker - really, guys, it was fun for a day or two but enough's enough now!),





and the former British embassy from the expat days (now a ski shop!), we also had a trip to Harbin's main municipal museum which is also housed in an impressive Russian building (saving the treat of the Japanese Germ Warfare Museum for another day!). Apart from that, and the fact that it's free to go in, it wasn't that exciting, although there were some interesting things there such as Qing-dynasty (17th century) traditional costumes, Ming pottery which looked as though it could have been bought last week at John Lewis, and some gorgeous silver trinkets from earlier eras. Oh, and a whole dinosaur (dead) and its eggs. On the whole though, if you can cast your mind back to museums you were forced to visit on school trips 30-plus years ago, you'll get the general idea - dusty, musty, and laid out in an unimaginative chronological order in glass cases, the way they used to do before someone twigged that this bored kids senseless and invented interactive displays. To give it its due, though, it was busy, with lots of families there - but then again, like I said before, it was the fifth day of a very long holiday!

By far the most interesting thing we saw, though, was Harbin's hutong. Fans of last year's Olympics will have heard tell of Beijing's hutong ad infinitum. Translated alternately as 'narrow alleyways' ('snickelways' to those familiar with York!) or 'slums', depending on your politico-cultural stance on such things, Beijing seems to be wiping its hutong out in the name of progress while simultaneously marketing the remaining ones as a tourist attraction. Harbin, I think, having now seen its version of the hutong, is unlikely ever to achieve the latter, but as some of the buildings are now being renovated there's a possibility that in ten years you may see the whole thing transformed - a la docklands - into trendy loft-apartment-type residences for upwardly-mobile young Chinese - or even pretentious westerners, assuming any (others) ever come to Harbin.

But for now, we felt it was important to capture this. The ghost-town aspect is mainly due to all the shops being shut for the festival, but it's still a million miles away from the shiny, wide-lane, high-tech environment in which we live.

Happy Birthday, Rover

We know January’s a dull and depressing month back home, so we thought we’d give you an excuse for a celebration.

If you have a dog, today is the day to dress up Pooch in his best party hat, bake him a doggy cake and invite all his little doggy friends over for a few games of Pass the Bone or Pin the Tail on the Postman. Yes folks, according to Chinese New Year lore, today (the second day of the lunar new year) is all dogs’ birthday.

Now what could be more sensible than that? All the pets I ever had were born long before we bought or acquired them, so we always had to make birthdays up for them and more or less guess their ages – with the exception of the cat who had the same birthday as me, although I suspect my parents may have made that one up too out of sentimentality. Here, you’ve got your doggy date of birth all sorted for you thanks to centuries of tradition.

Apologies to cat-lovers, by the way, as the moggies don’t seem to get a look-in on this one. Actually I don’t think many people have cats here; I’ve only seen about three (all on the same day, as it happens – dunno what that signifies!). Most people have what we call SLDs (Silly Little Dogs) of the type beloved of supermodels and elderly Spanish ladies. In fact, prior to coming to China I thought Barcelona was the SLD capital of the world, but Harbin or Shanghai may well have stolen its crown.

Now, while I’m on the subject of New Year lore, here are some Errata (tut!) from the previous post. According to Peter, the fires on street corners are NOT made from coals but from paper. (It looks likes coals to me.) If you want your ancestors to get a car, you DRAW a car on a piece of paper and then burn it, not write the word. (What’s the difference if it’s in Chinese characters anyway?!) The third and fourth days of the new year are the ones for visiting graves, NOT the second day – obviously, you’ll be too busy making jelly and ice cream for your dog on Day 2 – silly of me. And you’ll be pleased to know, I’m sure, that Kevin managed to get a cancellation for a second class airline ticket home so didn’t have to fly first class after all – though having flown second class on Chinese airlines many times now myself, frankly in his position I would have stuck to the ‘Oh no, I can’t get a ticket’ line, seeing as someone else was paying!

So, how did we spend New Year’s Eve? The one two nights ago, obviously, not the real one; we spent that, ironically enough, having a Chinese meal in Wetherby and then discoing the night away with my irrepressible in-laws (the oldest teenagers in town) at the Swan and Talbot, and a jolly good night was had by all. I was about to say that this is the first time I’ve ever had two NYEs in the space of a month, but in fact that’s not strictly true. In 1997, if memory serves, we not only had two Hogmanays but even saw the new year in twice in the same night (on about December 19th) - but that’s another story.

I was thinking we could maybe travel the world in search of cultures who celebrate New Year at other times, and see if we can get into the Guinness Book of Records for the most New Years in a year, or something? We could be like that crazy bloke somewhere in England who celebrates Christmas 365 days a year. I can see us wearing party hats all the time, shrieking ‘The bells, the bells!’ in an over-excited manner whenever midnight came and perpetually singing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ while attempting to snog strangers at every opportunity, until everyone was thoroughly sick of us.

But I digress.

The main feature of the other night’s celebrations was, of course, fireworks. We needn’t have worried about not seeing any, or having to stand out in the cold to watch them – they were being set off continuously all evening, in many cases just feet from our window.

In the UK when people do fireworks in their back gardens on November 5th, it’s pretty safe, partly because the fireworks are so – well – crap, and partly because everyone has been so indoctrinated into the discipline of ‘lighting the blue touchpaper and then withdrawing’ (always sounds a bit rude to me) and keeping small children and animals at least 20 feet away at all times, that the frisson of excitement factor is generally nil.

Here they like to live on the edge. Letting off fireworks a couple of feet outside the front door of a tower block, so that the flying, burning bits (and boy did they fly) land on people’s balconies and set fire to stuff? Not a problem. The fire brigade were called, and a few people – but not many, really, considering the size of the apartment block in question, which was just across the street from us – sensibly put on their coats, evacuated the building and waited outside until they could see it was safe to return. But most, including the people in the flat ALMOST DIRECTLY ABOVE the one with the fire, stayed in and watched out of the window.

No fewer than four fire engines arrived, which seemed a little excessive in view of the fact that this scenario must surely have been being replicated a hundred times all over Harbin. Two firemen eventually appeared in the window directly above the blaze, which was about 14 floors up. The flat itself was in darkness, the residents presumably absent and unaware that their precious collection of rotting cabbages or whatever they were storing on their balcony was going up in smoke. The firemen tried to hose out the flames, but were unable to get the right angle. They therefore withdrew for a consultation of the type the Chinese do best, discussing the best course of action at length while the disaster unfolds before their eyes (heaven forbid that anyone should lose face by making a quick decision). Finally the guy from the flat opposite the one they were in (the one mentioned above who’d been watching the whole thing from his window), came out onto his balcony and poured a bucket of water over the fire beneath, extinguishing it completely.

Total time and manpower expended by the fire brigade: twenty minutes, four engines, goodness knows how many fire-fighting personnel in each, and one very long hose. Result: zero. Number of people burning to death in other parts of the city while this fiasco was taking place: unknown.

Apart from this, our chief entertainment of the evening was watching the annual CCTV Gala on telly, helpfully partially dubbed and subtitled by our friends at good old CCTV9. Traditionally, all Chinese families would gather round the TV after their New Year’s Eve meal (much like the Morecambe & Wise Christmas Show in Britain in the 70s) to watch this five-hour extravaganza. Clearly many people nowadays prefer to be outside setting fire to their neighbours’ balconies and deafening unsuspecting westerners with non-stop firecracker explosions, but the Gala is bigger and better than ever nonetheless.

Words are a poor tool with which to describe this event. Sorry to hark back to the 1970s yet again, but that was the last time that we attempted a variety show to even begin to rival this. There was song, dance and, er, ‘comedy’ on a gigantic scale. The costumes were huge. The hair was huger - and more glittery, and more solid. Every performer was backed by several hundred dancers in elaborate attire chosen to reflect the theme of the song. The set had a jaw-dropping backdrop with vast pillars and a constantly changing computer graphic showing everything from swirling flowers to happy children gamboling in the fields, and even a giant dancing ginseng root for the rap song about Chinese herbal medicine. (Yes really. Choice lyrics: ‘The medicine may be bitter but the affliction is more galling’, or ‘I will write you a prescription to cure the ill caused by fawning on foreign things’.) This was performed by a pretty boy in a gold jacket and a tiny six-year-old Michael-Jackson-alike who could spin on his head.

If the singing was bad, the comedy sketches reached new heights of awfulness. Unfortunately they didn’t subtitle them fully, just gave a summary of the plot, which didn’t really illuminate why everyone was roaring with laughter or why the flippin’ thing went on for twenty minutes. We did laugh, however, when it came to the sketch which for some inexplicable reason was set in ‘an expensive Scottish restaurant’ in a remote Chinese village. (Someone should tell them there are no Scottish restaurants, even in Scotland.) I think the Scottish theme had been introduced for comedy value merely in order to get a camp waiter in a skirt on stage. This chap’s costume was basically a LONG, tartan-ish skirt, complete with white lace frill around the hem and a strange flap at the side. With this he wore a long, silky, white tunic, a tartan scarf flung rakishly around his neck, and shiny black brogues. Presumably this is how they think Scottish men dress (in their ‘stripy skirts’)!! Regrettably we never found out what was on the menu in this Scottish restaurant as that bit wasn’t translated.

In any case, by then the explosions from outside had got so loud that we couldn’t hear the telly any more. From about 11pm, if you’d phoned us you could seriously have been forgiven for thinking we were in a war zone. It was constant, and absolutely deafening. We had to shout to each other to make ourselves heard. Fortunately, as I say, this did succeed in drowning out the finale of the Gala, which consisted of a number of medleys of very scary ‘Isn’t China GREAT??!!!’ songs clearly from a previous era which shall remain nameless.

At about 1.30am, the noise had just about subsided enough for us to go to bed. They very considerately waited until 8.15am the next morning before starting again. It took us most of yesterday to recover.

Thank goodness we don’t have a dog. I just couldn’t handle the stress of a party today.