The cabbages are coming! (Part 2)

As a child, I loved the Moomin books by Finnish author Tove Jansson. If you’re not familiar with these, they tell of the adventures of a group of cute, fantastical creatures that live in the north of Scandinavia. Several of the books feature seasonal themes, such as one entitled Moomin Valley in November which describes how the various characters cope with seeing their world transformed from a summer playground to a bleak, autumnal landscape.

This is how it felt, returning to Harbin yesterday.

Firstly, the heating STILL isn’t on. We’re reliably informed, though, that it comes on next Monday. Apparently October 20th is the first day that it’s considered cold enough. Yeah, right. That’s why last night we sat in our flat wearing our coats and scarves, wondering how we would ever pluck up the courage to get undressed to go to bed. It’s a bit brutal after the heat of Shanghai (which was just pleasant at this time of year, should you ever consider a trip there; don’t go in August). It reminds me of the time we went on holiday to Tenerife at the end of September, and flew back into Glasgow airport at 3am on an October night which was, as the Scots say, baltic. It came, to put it mildly, as a bit of a shock to the system.

Note to self for next year: the first three weeks of October are not a good time to be in Harbin. They are a good time to take a long holiday, somewhere hot.

Secondly, the trees, which were all still green when we left less than two weeks ago, are now mostly yellow. I say mostly, because they are going yellow from the bottom up. I’ve never seen anything like it. If memory serves, the trees back home (and anywhere else I’ve ever observed trees in autumn) turn in a more random fashion, a few leaves yellowing here and there at first, some going quite brown and then dropping off, while a few green ones cling on tenaciously well into November.

Here, all the trees lining the road from the airport had brown, shrivelled leaves on the lower branches, completely yellow leaves over the middle and high branches, and right at the top, a tiny crown of green. They are spindly trees whose branches all point upwards. If anyone can enlighten me as to what kind they are, I’d be interested to find out - the knowledge of nature which I once gleaned from educational childhood drives with the AA Book of the Road being now sadly lost in the mists of time.

Last but not least, if the day we left was Leek Day, this is most definitely Cabbage Week. In some cases the leeks are still out as well, though most people seem to have put them away and they can be seen hanging from ceilings on balconies and in utility rooms. Outside our front door, however, we are privileged to have both. If you don’t believe me, here’s the photographic evidence. I’ll give a prize (virtual only, I’m afraid) to the first person who can correctly guess the next vegetable to appear on the streets on Harbin – if there is one.

Occasionally people come out and start trimming them or picking bits off them. I don’t know if this is just for preparation purposes or whether they’re harvesting bits for their dinner.

There are a number of other unanswered questions too, such as: do they leave them outside even when it starts snowing and is sub-zero? What happens when they start to rot? I can’t say I fancy living with the smell of rotting cabbage for the next 4 months.

But most importantly, how do they know whose leeks are whose? They’re everywhere. How can such a system possibly work? Do they have special Vegetable Wardens to prevent Grand Leek Larceny? Which if you ever watched The Good Life, you’ll know is a very serious matter. Certainly our security guard has taken to patrolling up and down this stretch of courtyard, and was very suspicious when I started taking pictures. The Leek Police dismisseth us.

Of cabbages and things

Of all the sentences I ever thought I’d hear myself utter, ‘Oh God, I’m SOOO BORED of coming to Shanghai now!’ wasn’t one of them.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great place – or at least what we’ve seen of it is (if you don’t mind air and noise pollution, excessive humidity and being almost mown down by scooters whenever you try to walk anywhere). It’s just that we seem to have spent a disproportionate amount of our time on a plane between here and Harbin, en route to or from an airport, or walking through the vast echoing halls of Pudong Terminal 2, which could be a fitness plan in its own right if you didn’t fancy any other forms of exercise. We’re up and down here so often that I’m becoming convinced that a) there are in fact no other places in China besides Harbin and Shanghai, and b) they’re just next door to one another, whereas in fact a) China’s ginormous and b) er, China’s ginormous and the distance between Shanghai & Harbin is about 1000 miles – a 2 and a half hour flight, or the equivalent of flying from Edinburgh to Prague or London to Rome and back every couple of weeks. No wonder it’s a drag.

Every time we come here we’re either in transit to somewhere else, always either jet-lagged or about to be and never have a chance to look around, or alternatively – as this time - we’re here to complete some tiresome visa-related errand involving being relieved of our passports for several days and generally messed about. And, having left Harbin complaining of the cold, here it’s still slightly disagreeably muggy and Peter, predictably, has done nothing but moan about the heat, while the aircon in the hotel is of course off since it’s now ‘winter’ (I even saw a girl in a woolly hat this morning).

As you’ll have gathered, I’m in a bad mood. I won’t be happy until we get these damn visas sorted out once and for all. But, in order to maintain peace and harmony and keep you entertained, I’m going to ignore it and tell you an interesting aside instead.

Last time he was down here, Peter was told that up until about twenty years ago - presumably before many people had fridges or freezers and before the advent of long-distance distribution and supermarket chains in China - it was common practice in Shanghai for everyone to have a stock of cabbages for the winter, which they kept outside on the ground or on their balconies so that they would remain cold. The cabbages were delivered about now, October, and kept throughout the winter, slowly rotting, but come February people would still be eating them, peeling off the outer rotten leaves to find they were still edible inside.

In modern Shanghai today you don’t see much of this, apparently. But the outdoor fridge tradition would appear to be alive and well in Harbin. Yesterday as we were driven to the airport we noticed that on every available space – on pavements, roadsides, front steps of apartment blocks and shops, hanging from balconies, windowsills and doorknobs, and being transported around on stalls, carts and bikes – were hundreds and hundreds of ….

LEEKS !!!

(Plus a few cabbages for good measure.)

They hadn’t been there a couple of days before. Where did they come from? Was yesterday one of those dates which everyone just knows by osmosis is Leek Day? I bet in two weeks’ time if you try to get leeks in the supermarket there won’t be a single one to be had.

Anyway, on a loosely related topic, for the Have I Got News for You fans among you, here’s the missing words round.

Frustrated Welsh farmers face prison over [....... ?]

Woman catches [......?] from garden badgers, report claims

Headlines from Farmers’ Weekly; don’t you just love trade journals?

Maybe we should tell the Welsh farmers about the Harbin leek glut? You never know; it might help.

The heat is on (not)

Harbin, as I think I may have mentioned, is a place with an extreme climate. Like Montreal, whose latitude it more or less shares. Now you know how an extreme climate works, don’t you? In winter it’s very very cold indeed, 30° below zero, with snow and ice and such. In summer it’s really very hot - 30° and more above - tropical, almost - so hot you’d never believe the ice & snow were there six months ago if you hadn’t seen them with your own eyes. Got it.

But wait, aren’t we forgetting something? Cast your mind back to primary school. How many seasons are there? That’s right. So what does an extreme climate do in the season that comes between summer and winter? Changes from one to the other, that’s what. And as the needle on that thermometer has to travel such a long way in such a short time, it changes pretty damn fast – dropping about 5 degrees per week in fact – at night anyway. If you’re not familiar with the climate of Edinburgh then you’ll no doubt wonder why I find this even worthy of comment. But if you were used to living in a place where the weather’s more or less the same all year round apart from the odd warmish week in July and the odd coldish week in January, you would understand why the concept of a proper autumn is a revelation.

Come April or May, when the process is reversed, I shall doubtless be reporting with smug delight the joys of actually being able to step outside in light clothing and bask in spring sunshine, rather than the Scottish custom of gazing with confusion at the advancing calendar and wondering why there are no leaves on the trees and I’m still wearing a woolly hat. But for now I’m grumpily stomping about the house swathed in fluffy socks and huge jumpers which don’t normally see the light of day until Christmas-time, and occasionally sporting my dressing-gown as outer wear, and cursing whoever’s brilliant idea it was to have the heating in all the buildings here centrally controlled.

Yes, you read that correctly. We can’t switch on our own heating. We have to wait until The Powers That Be deem it cold enough. Surely this is taking communist communal whatnot to its most ridiculous and barbaric extreme. (Although I seem to remember they have the same system in France. I rest my case.)

I had been holding out with some optimism for October 1st to be the big switch-on day. After all, September 1st was considered an appropriate date for switching off the air conditioning in all the buildings, so I reckoned, a month of in-betweeny weather and then bam – October – it’s winter and the heating goes on. The shopping malls have been overheated for a week or more so I really got my hopes up.

But, alas, yesterday came and went and our floorboards - under which, I’m told, our elusive heating lies - remain resolutely cold to the touch, despite me testing them with a hopeful toe every couple of hours. Peter’s boss (who’s in the same boat in his building) said, ‘Oh, in Anshan it doesn’t come on until 1st November’. But Anshan’s several hundred miles south of here. They couldn’t be that cruel up here, could they? Could they?

The trouble is that, actually, if I’m truly honest now, it’s still vaguely warm outside during the day. Balmy enough for a mini plaguette of ladybirds, even. (What are the chances of that? The last time I saw that was in the Long Hot Summer of 1976, and believe me, that ain’t where we’re headed right now!) The Harbin locals, being used to those 30°C summer temps & all, think it’s cold enough to wear jackets but it’s really not. The other day we went for a walk and wrapped ourselves up in jumpers, coats, scarves and gloves, so convinced were we that if it was this cold indoors it must be freezing out. When we got outside it was 19°C and we had to take everything off again.

Unfortunately our flat’s south-facing side is entirely blocked in by high buildings and so we get no sun whatsoever. Add to this our double (or in some places quadruple) glazing – of which we’ll no doubt be exceptionally glad when winter comes in earnest – and you have one highly insulated ice box with no heat source. Even Peter, He Who Never Feels Cold, is wearing a fleece and his SHOES indoors.

I’m so depressed I nearly did my tax return.

But instead, I have decided that as Peter has to go to Shanghai on Sunday in order to start the next stage of the visa saga on Monday, little though I relish the prospect of leaving our home to live in a hotel again, I shall decamp there with him for a week or so. It’s 25-30°C there at the moment. (Ironically, Chinese government policy is that all public buildings south of the Yangtze River have no heating at all, so in a month’s time everyone in Shanghai will be sitting in the office with their overcoats on while we in Harbin will be walking on hot floors. I hope).

Then next week I shall do my best to convince everyone that I shouldn’t risk trying to get my visa in Shanghai and that it would be best for me to go back to the UK to get it as Peter did, and stay there for a couple of weeks. I know it’ll be cold and miserable there, but you have a brilliant thing called an On switch, and right now that sounds like heaven.

Fun

Last night we had our first social engagement since we came to China a month ago (if you don’t count a token-gesture meal out with the Big Boss in Shanghai the week we arrived, which you shouldn’t).

This was a ‘party’ given by the Less Big Boss here in Harbin, ostensibly as a belated flat-warming but really a Meet the Girlfriend event, as she’s visiting for the week. This is, annoyingly for those of us stalled in the middle of visa processing, a holiday week here. Today, 1st October, is China’s National Day – the anniversary of the founding of the PRC in 1949 – and they get a whole week off for it. All of them. Well, shops are open, builders are still building (drilling above my head as I type), but nobody else is doing a stitch of work all week.

Up until last year they had three of these ‘Golden Weeks’ as they’re called: this one, one in February for Chinese New Year, and one in May for Labour Day. The purpose of these is to boost the economy through increased domestic tourism and binge shopping and NOT, as you might imagine, to give the poor overworked Chinese a few days’ paid holiday, which they actually don’t get otherwise unless they’re lucky enough to work for a western company. But as of this year the government decided people weren’t spending enough and the detrimental impact on the economy from everything shutting down was outweighing the advantages, so they cut one of the Golden Weeks (the May one) and replaced it with a few extra one-day holidays instead. Now everyone is up in arms about it because a three-day weekend isn’t much use for visiting long-distance family in a country the size of China, and as a result this week was predicted to be the busiest October week for travel ever.

Apart from that, I don’t think much goes on really. There are quite a few red lanterns up around the place (see pic), which is pretty. I was hoping to see some kind of spectacular parade, but it seems that unless it’s a special anniversary that kind of thing went out with Mao. There might be a firework display but I’m not hopeful.

So, to return to the subject of Fun, Chinese style. Now those of you who know me know I like a party. Drinking, dancing, chatting, loud music, more dancing, more drinking, etc. That’s a party, right? Wrong, it seems, in China. Perhaps it was just that particular group of people, who were all Chinese apart from us, Boss and Boss’s girlfriend, or perhaps we’re getting old (heaven forbid!), but this so-called party consisted of nine people sitting around a coffee table picking at nibbles – rather self-consciously as the Chinese weren’t touching them – talking mainly about the weather and the best methods of cleaning hard-wood floors (I kid you not), and then having to go out for a meal because Boss didn’t have enough plates to serve us all food. We got to the restaurant about 9pm, which is considered extremely late for eating here, and everyone picked at their food again and at 10.30 all went home.

Just wait until we have our flat-warming party; we’ll show them how it should be done.