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?

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.

So much to blog, so little time

With our festive jaunt home to Blighty hurtling rapidly towards us, there seem to be a million things – well, at least three – each of which I could have written a whole article about but simply don’t have time. There follows, therefore, a smorgasbord of observations about this crazy world in which we find ourselves, which if I don’t get them down now are in danger of falling into the vast black hole that I once laughingly called my memory, never to be seen again.

So. Last week we had to call Building Management out again, when another dodgy bulb tripped all our fuses for the second time. It seems that they’d been trying to get in to see us for several weeks to check our water meter, but every time they came to the door we didn’t understand what they wanted so they hadn’t been able to gain access. We don’t like to call poor Kevin too often.

Anyway it appears that our water meter is low on money. The landlord says he will come ‘sometime’ and put some more money on it. He is unable to tell us when ‘sometime’ will be, despite the fact that we’re going away tomorrow for three weeks, but until then we are ‘not to worry’. This is typical of the Chinese total inability to plan anything in advance. They simply do not, will not, or cannot do it. On the day before our party, at about 4.30pm, Kevin sidled up to Peter looking a bit embarrassed and said sheepishly that ‘the girls’ had asked him to find out if we would have the party that night instead, as it suited them better! Attempting to order diaries and calendars as New Year gifts for his customers, Peter has been frustrated by the lack of any with space to write down appointments. When Kevin saw Peter’s own (British) diary he was baffled. ‘But why would you want to write down what you’re doing in the future?’, he enquired. ‘Chinese people do not do that. Sometimes they think about tomorrow. Or maybe, sometimes, the next day.’

Often Peter arrives at work in the morning to be told he has a meeting with an important client in half an hour’s time, which has just been arranged. They arrive to find about 10 local dignatories, bureau heads, factory bosses and the like who have all assembled at what appears to be a moment’s notice. After the meeting, they progress to an apparently equally impromptu but sumptuous lunch of unidentifiable but delicious dishes, be it at the most expensive restaurant in Harbin or a transport caff in a dodgy rural town (where all conversation stops and all heads turn as Peter walks in). Much ‘Gan bei!’ and general hilarity ensues, even when the interpreter has to leave early, leaving him alone with a group of monolingual Chinese bigwigs. Business here is strongly based on the principle of ‘guan xi’ which translates as ‘business relationship’ but basically seems to mean ‘getting people to trust you by getting drunk with them outside work before anyone signs anything’. No wonder he’s enjoying his job!

Some of the places he’s visited on these jaunts have been eye-openers. Parts of Harbin itself are quite poor, but outside the city it’s another world. Last week he went to Acheng, which he described as ‘like Castleford or Pontefract in the 1970s’ (not, I gather, a recommendation) but which still boasted huge wide streets, impressive amounts of public artworks, and the entrance to the town was guarded by a huge arch, fabulously decorated in vibrant colours. In another place, they had to drive through a market, squeezing between stalls where people were selling frozen meat and fish - frozen by the air temperature, that is; no need for freezers here! They had almost reached the end when a vehicle appeared, blocking their way. With no way to turn round, Mr Li, our ultra-resourceful and ever-smiling driver, reversed the entire length of the market, back between the stalls down the narrow, winding lane, with frozen fish being flung back and forth and a guy on a tricycle behind him, who would only reverse a few yards at a time until Mr Li got out and remonstrated firmly with him. The whole process took about an hour.

Needless to say, the weather fazes the locals not one jot. Peter’s first farm visit took place on the first day that the temperature dropped to minus 11°. Everyone happily tramped about in the snow and ice looking at maize pellets or whatever. In the UK such an event would have been cancelled on the spot. (Though of course this does presuppose that it would have been planned in advance!). But then they were all no doubt wearing the ubiquitous, the redoubtable, the indispensible - Harbin Thermals.

Thermals. God how they love them. Especially longjohns. You could almost hear the collective sigh of relief after they were able to get them on when it got vaguely cold at the start of November. Of course some people hedge their bets and never take them off all year round. We even saw brides wearing them under their wedding dresses on a hot day in May (truly). There are shops selling nothing but. I’m not saying you don’t need them of course – the wind doesn’t half bite through your trousers when you go out otherwise – but the problem is that if you go out, generally you’re going TO somewhere, like the shops, or a restaurant. And the shops and restaurants are BOILING, which makes the wearing of thermals quite unbearable indoors.

At Harbin airport they have countered this problem by supplying little changing booths near the baggage reclaim (with signs in Chinese, English and Russian), for the purposes of changing into your longjohns after arriving from somewhere hot. How brilliant an idea is that? Now if the shopping centres and supermarkets did that, it would be ok. But as it is, you have to put your thermals on immediately before leaving the house and then make a run for it (seeing as it’s constantly 27°C in our flat – and I mean constantly). Then by the time you’ve arrived at your destination and are just about feeling a bit chilly and glad you put them on, you’re back indoors into a super-heated place with huge padded curtains over the doors for insulation, and pouring sweat while carrying your coat around. Something’s not right there. No wonder the locals acclimatise so well to their thermals that they’re terrified to take them off.

But otherwise they’re remarkably well-adapted to the weather. When it snows – which is disappointingly not that often, actually – an army of men with broomsticks materialises from nowhere, and with rapid efficiency they clear the snow from the roads and pavements within what seems like minutes. There’s none of the head-scratching and wondering what this white stuff can be that’s falling out of the sky, which accompanies the UK’s every annual snowfall. Once that’s done, being a very dry climate, there’s no slush to contend with, just icy patches here and there. Still, we do find it quite funny that people are sending us Christmas cards with snow-scenes on and writing things like ‘Bet your weather’s very different to this!!’ inside. Er, no, it’s not. It might be 27°C in our flat, but in the unheated utility room/balcony, a 3-litre bottle of water turned to a solid block of ice overnight.

And talking of solid blocks of ice, preparations for the famous Harbin ice festival would appear to be underway! Yes it seems this is one thing they CAN plan in advance for! So by way of Christmas greetings to you all, here are some pics of the embryonic ice sculptures – or more like ice constructions – which are shooting up around Peter’s office and our flat.

Tomorrow we’re off to Shanghai for the company expats’ Christmas lunch - at the Hilton, no less, where we get to behave like old colonials for a day – and then home for the festive season. So I’ll say Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all, and see you in three weeks.

Where we're going, we don't need roads

Back from Hong Kong, a chance to reflect and indulge in a spot of philosophical musing on the nature of time, progress and so forth.

Watching fave comfort-film Back to the Future last night may have brought this on. Or perhaps it was the fact that Peter was clearing out some old papers today and came across an envelope which he was supposed to post to the Premium Bonds people to tell them he’d moved house. In 1967.

Anyway, ever since we arrived in China, we’ve been saying how it feels like being in a time warp. Obvious examples of modern technology such as the internet and ubiquitous mobile phones aside, it has very much the feel of the UK in say, the mid-1980s. It’s not just the prevalence of poodle perms. It’s the sense of optimism, combined with conspicuous consumerism by the rich while facilities and infrastructure have to advance by leaps and bounds to try to keep up (and don’t always succeed), and while others still struggle in poverty.

Chinese cities are full of people who make a living collecting and selling rubbish for recycling – plastic water bottles, old cardboard, you name it. You sometimes see pictures of them with the rubbish piled high on the backs of their bikes (or occasionally donkey-carts). We call them ‘tub-thumpers’, as they ride the streets thumping loudly and continuously on an empty oil drum attached to the handle-bars to advertise their presence, sometimes shouting out as well, in a way which reminds me of the rag-and-bone man who still used to call round our area in his horse-drawn cart when I was a kid in the 70s. But I suspect that within ten years they’ll be gone, as China continues to rev up to 88mph and propel itself into the future, obliterating everything which could possibly mark it out as a ‘developing’ country.

There’s no doubt about it though - if in China it’s about 1986, in Hong Kong it’s roughly 1974. Admittedly due to our unfortunate medical experience we didn’t see much of it, but we drove through it, I managed a bit of shopping on the last day, and you get a feel for a place. Much of it had a very slightly seedy, run-down feel; the hospital and hotel were decorated in beige and chintz and appeared to be run by Peter’s grandparents, but I kind of liked it. They had proper, old-fashioned trams. Troupes of schoolgirls in white dresses could be seen, shepherded by nuns. I found this brilliant arcade of little shops selling cool clothes at reasonable prices. As China is coming up in the world, Hong Kong is definitely going down and is no longer where it’s at, but I found this preferable to China’s immense, glitzy malls full of over-priced shops, no customers and bored staff who pounce on you and try to push their most expensive items on you all the time.

Maybe it’s my age, as they say, but I do find myself yearning for a simpler time. A time when I wouldn’t have had to phone my credit card company yesterday to ask them to reactivate my card, due to the fact that I had to pay a deposit of $20,000HK (about £1600) on admission to hospital, and even though I had phoned them in August and told them I was moving to China they were only allowed to record that I would be here for 90 days, after which I would have to phone them again and tell them I would be here for another 90 days, and so on, and even though the HK payment was in China and was within the 90 days, and even though the hospital subsequently cancelled the payment anyway because they got clearance from our insurers that my bills would be covered, the credit card people STILL thought it was fraudulent and stopped my card without contacting me to check.

I mean, what kind of a world are we living in here? Call me a cynic, but surely most self-respecting credit card thieves would go on a splurge and buy designer goods or fly to exotic destinations with their ill-gotten gains? Not think, ‘Ooh, I know, I’ll check myself into a crappy hospital in Hong Kong for a spot of freeloading puking’.

On the other hand, simpler times are often over-rated. This we discovered when a light-bulb going in our bedroom at 11.30pm last night tripped a fuse which took out the power to the whole flat. (Just in case we were getting lulled into a false sense of security by not having any disasters befall us for at least three days.) This led to 12 hours without electricity, a freezer full of ruined food, and a few panicky Sunday morning calls to our poor long-suffering interpreter, Kevin, who eventually a) established that we had not – quite – run out of credit on our meter, and b) got a security guard to come up, flip a switch behind a locked panel outside our front door, and hey presto everything beeped and flashed and was working again.

Honestly, will this never end?

I’m now thinking of investing in a DeLorean. The only trouble is, I can’t quite decide whether to set the time coordinates forwards or backwards.

Water, water, everywhere

I do so hope you can see these pictures clearly. This is several official men, including a uniformed security guard (later joined by a second), trying to clear up a major leak from a manhole cover in our courtyard by sweeping at it with broomsticks - proper ones, as ridden by the Wicked Witch of the West (though of course she'd have melted in so much water).

This was the scene I came home to today - about three inches of water outside our front door due to I don't know what, but enough to make them shut off the water to the whole building earlier, without warning or explanation.

This was somewhat disturbing because we pay for our water by the primitive means of a card inserted into a meter under the sink. When I asked our interpreter, Kevin, what would happen when this ran out, he said, 'The water will stop', as if this was the most obvious and normal thing in the world. Our landlords had offered to pay for the water for a year in advance for us, but as they'd failed to get a fa piao, Kevin had sucked his teeth in a jobsworth manner and they took the card away.

Hence my panic today, but fortunately Kevin's phone was engaged, and I was just about to go over to the office to harangue him when an almighty gurgling erupted from our toilets and the water came back on.