Winter Days

Its very, VERY cold here. We have a thermometer hanging outside the kitchen window and we go and peek at it regularly - especially first thing in the morning. The last four days has been our four-day break, and it’s been hovering between 2 and 4 all day, and down to -1 overnight. Today it crept up to 6. And the humidity it shows too, it’s been 100% almost every day for a while now. So it’s cold and damp, and murky looking. We keep hoping that we will see some snow soon to make up for the cold.

So we are all into long-johns - winter underwear! I don't usually feel cold, but even I am glad to be wearing long leggings under my jeans. You should see the babies around here. They put so many layers on them they can't bend or move.

But, despite the fact that it's winter, there is still plenty of fruit for sale, cheap too. The nicest fruit we have here is nashi pears - they call them "apple pears", I think. They are huge and juicy and sweet, much better than the ones we had in Australia. The bananas here are beautiful too - they must bring them from south China. Lately we have got some really nice mandarins. We have found some nice tomatos recently too. They are big and pink, and they stay firm and ripe and delicious for ages - you would expect them to go off quickly if you bought them that coloured in Australia. Sometimes we get nice carrots, and celery (but I hate celery). But greens ... they put their lettucey stuff out to dry. We don't know what the point of that is. Anything green we do get in our food is soggy, or its seaweed - bleh! I just don't like black plasticky seaweed, or frilly sea sponge, or sea slug ... or any of that stuff!

Bea is not keen on the food! Despite telling us she was looking forward to a "full on" experience, she's a typical teenage wimp when it comes to food. "I can't help what I don't like!" she says. The only thing we have found she is comfortable eating regularly is toast (even though all the bread here always has that strange sweet taste) with "tiny cheese" - the only cheese we can get is little foil-covered squares of cream-cheese designed for little kids. We can't get margarine, and butter is occasionally available at 2yuan (Chinese dollars) for one of those little individual serves..., so the tiny cheese (also 2yuan for a slightly bigger square) helps. Our friend from Beijing visited recently, and brought some Vegemite as a special treat. You can't get it here, but in Beijing its 52yuan for a little jar!

We are getting better at using buses, and have been further a field this weekend. We purchased a map of Zhengzhou city - all in Chinese, of course - which we found has bus numbers (tiny little red numbers!) in between the Chinese characters. We also found that just standing on the pavement looking at the map is really useful, people come from everywhere who know a word or two of English and want to help.

I've always hated bartering. But the other day Bea saw a little jade bottle she wanted for a gift for a friend, and Peter told me to go ahead and bargain. The lady wrote down the number 160(yuan), so I turned to walk away - way out of my range! But the crowd that had begun to gather shouted for us to come back and write down an offer. Feeling very bold, I wrote '30'. She came back with '50'. (So much for the 160!) This was when I realized that 30 was probably above what I wanted to pay in the first place, and I wasn't about to go higher, and I should have been more bold. So, we walked away. But they called us back and said they would accept the 30! Well, in the end I paid 30, pleased that I got it down from 160, but feeling that I still paid way too much. Us white guys must have "sucker" written all over us!

They are offering Bea work here. I am not sure that she is ready for that, though her father is keen for her to try. Between finishing high school, and culture shock, I don't want to push her to hard.

The power went off twice yesterday. And our (reverse cycle) air conditioner in our main room has totally died. And my bike is un-ridable and needs fixing. And our remote control is broken - which matters because without it we can't watch DVDs in colour, only black and white, because for some reason that feature only works with the remote. And just now I plugged our portable blow-heater into a powerboard ... and the powerboard went up in flames. And our main door-lock is broken - Peter got a key jammed and now it won't work at all.