New kid on the blog

Ok, I swear if I’d thought of that title earlier I’d have posted this sooner.

Or maybe not. Many, many apologies for the long hiatus, but as most of you know by now, it’s been nearly a month since Baby A exploded into our lives, a full two and a half weeks earlier than we expected him. One minute I’m waddling around with nothing to blog about because I’m so big I can hardly get off the sofa, and the next there’s simply not a spare moment which isn’t being literally eaten up by a very small person with a very large personality. Amazing how things can change in the blink of an eye.

Babies share so many characteristics with the typical Chinese. Both sleep a lot, make a lot of noise, have no consideration for others, and never do what you want at the time you want them to do it. But you can’t help loving them for their hilarious wide-eyed innocence and cheek. So perhaps China is the best place to have one – at least you get some practice. On the other hand there are a number of aspects which I’d recommend taking into consideration, should anyone out there ever, ever contemplate such a thing themselves.

1. Medical. Ok so this isn’t anything to do with China but I had to get a moan in. Far be it from me to break the conspiracy of silence which seems to prevent those who’ve had children from warning those who haven’t just how bloody awful childbirth is. I mean, I suppose the future of the human race might be at stake. But let me just say this. You know the scene in ‘This is Spinal Tap’ where they realise they’ve put the measurements for Stonehenge in inches instead of feet? Well, I imagine something very similar must have happened when God, or the elves, or whoever designed people, first saw the prototype for a baby’s head and the area from which it has to emerge. You can just see the guy’s face when the awful realisation struck that he’d made a mistake in the blueprint which nobody had noticed, and it was too late to change it. You can hear him thinking ‘Shit. Oh, it’ll be all right’ (without much conviction), and hurriedly deleting all the relevant files so that no-one would realise it was him that had screwed up.

Well all I can say is, I still can’t walk after 4 weeks, so I hope they caught him and fired him. Also, as bad luck would have it, my, er, issues coincided with one of Peter's mosquito bite episodes. He's violently allergic to the little blighters and swells up in suppurating buboes which throb, pulsate and pustulate with a life of their own, usually in several places at once. All in all the two of us spent about a fortnight looking - and feeling - as though we'd been in a car crash. Judging by the size of me, in my case I can only assume the other vehicle involved was a lorry carrying a large consignment of cakes and chocolate, all of which I felt compelled to eat while I lay by the side of the road waiting for the ambulance.

2. Logistical. Getting to the hospital at 3am while in labour was supposed to be organised in advance. Big Boss was going to lay on a car. Drivers were to be primed and ready to rush to our assistance. Did this happen? No. Peter sent Big Boss an email the week before to remind him, but BB was away and by the time he got back, Baby A had decided enough was enough and popped out. I think the email is still unanswered. So we had to flag down a taxi. At least it wasn’t raining.

Actually there was no problem and I don’t think the taxi driver even realised what was going on. Not so the SECOND taxi driver who had to take us BACK to the hospital late at night after I’d been discharged, in some pain from a bladder infection and muscle spasms in my hip. We had the baby in a car seat but I don’t think the driver noticed, so we were convinced he thought I was in labour, the way I was groaning and clutching my (still somewhat large) stomach! At any rate he raced through the Shanghai Friday night traffic at a pace befitting Starsky & Hutch and looked mighty relieved when we arrived. Thank goodness Baby didn’t suddenly wake up & make a noise; I think the poor bloke would have had a heart attack, thinking I’d just delivered on his back seat!

3. Social. The Chinese love babies, especially western babies. It can get rather annoying to be continually cooed over, and when the baby gets older, people apparently demand photos all the time. However, the most irritating thing is that they also have very strong opinions when it comes to baby care. Chinese wisdom recommends, among other things, not leaving the house at all for the first three months, keeping their feet covered at all times, even on sweltering hot days, and dressing them in bizarre crotchless trousers rather than using nappies. Expat mothers regularly complain of being stopped on the street by Chinese wifies offering advice and admonishments. So far though my main gripe is that everyone seems to think he’s a girl, for reasons unknown – even when he’s wearing a manly blue babygro with a picture of a digger on it.

4. Administrative. My feelings regarding a certain international medical insurance provider are on record, so I’ll refrain from repeating them here. I’ll say only this. It took fourteen (international) phone calls, plus several emails, to get a policy set up for Baby. Fourteen. And even then he’s barely covered for his vaccinations and well-baby checkups. It’s a bloody scandal.

The other amusing/frustrating aspect of having a child abroad is that you have to get it a passport and visa more or less immediately. Someone hasn’t thought through the implications of having hormonal women turn up at offices to fill in forms with short deadlines. I almost shouted at the British Consul for not having something suitable for me to lean on. But the fact that our son will have to endure THIS Photoshopped marvel

not only as his passport photo for the next five years but as endless humiliation potential for the rest of his life just about compensates.

Granny is due to visit from the UK on Thursday for two weeks, so the blog’s maternity leave may last a little longer yet, but fret not – we’ll be back in full force before you know it.

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 - postscript

The bad news: the window cleaners not only managed to soak our utility room with water pouring through from upstairs. They also knocked our satellite dish out of alignment, so I had to get the TV repair people back AS WELL. Water: you'd never believe the amount of trouble it can cause.

The good news: Peter told Big Boss about our taxi-in-the-rain experience, and he and several others were so horrified that a series of urgent meetings was held, with the result that we now have top priority access to company cars and drivers whenever we want them! I'm now feeling slightly guilty, and obliged to call out drivers for the slightest thing ('Er, I need to go to the shop for a pint of milk, can you send a car please?') to justify making such a fuss. They are also under strict instructions NEVER to send the Sciatica-Mobile van for me again. This was after an unfortunate incident when they sent it for us to do some baby-shopping in last week - thinking they were being helpful - and I flat refused to get in it.

AND, from some time in June to be confirmed, they're going to pay to keep the drivers on 24-hour standby on a rota for me going into labour! Which has got to beat standing by the side of the road in a downpour, probably in the middle of the night, with taxi drivers taking one look at me clutching my belly and thinking 'Blimey, I don't want her in the back of my taxi', for which I would hardly blame them.

And if I can contrive to break my washing machine again, I'll get a new one.

Now if THIS is what a bit of water trouble can do, I say bring it on!

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.

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.

Just in case you want proof

...or didn't read to the end last time and so missed our announcement, here's me. Taken today (Tuesday 3rd March). And there's still four months to go! How big is this baby going to be?

The fact that I am in front of the fridge is merely to show off my bump against a dark background and has NO other significance, honest!

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!