Apartment life week 3: what I've learned

1）Air conditioning is for the weak. The weather here has ranged from hot and sunny, to hot and rainy, to hot and suffocatingly-pollutiony. A/C would be nice, but we haven't turned it on. It's partly of old Chinese mother-goose wisdom about A/C causing colds, diarhhea, and all sorts of other horrors; also partly because of an unspoken competition between my two roommates and I to not be "that guy" who's the first to turn it on. Oh well, it's good for the environment.

2) But I've learned a better method to beat the heat, from the countless retired Chinese men who gamble in the alleyway behind my apartment. They all hike their t-shirts up halfway, exposing their Tsingtao beer bellies. Many a night, while studying at a restaurant, I'll overhear these drunk, old, half-clothed patrons complain to a 16 year-old waitress from the countryside that 4 kuai (50 cents) for a Tsingtao beer is outrageous.

3) The sun here is a fickle alarm clock. My bedroom window faces east, but thanks to Beijing pollution, some days I get a bright ray, on others I get a reddish glow.

4) When my Chinese roommate (recent b-school grad) invited his friends over to hang out, they didn't bring beers and chips. The brought a watermelon. I had to run, but apparently they just sat around chatting and eating watermelon.

5) The people who run produce stands in front of my apartment do not appreciate me coming back from Wal-Mart with bags full of groceries.

6) My apartment is filled with wannabe Paris Hiltons- on the way to school in the morning, I always pass a few people walking 4-inch long furballs of dogs.

7) Actually, my apartment is mostly filled with those migrant worker waitresses, originally from the countryside, who work at nearby restaurants.

8) The entire population of my apartment is prone, on a Saturday morning, to start scraping the paint off the walls of my apartment. They have a lot of work ahead of them. It's just surprising to see 50 or so people cramming the hallways and staircases doing maintenance work.

9) Six minutes is too long to walk from my apartment to my 8am class. Although, while cramming for the dictation every morning, I've found that burying my head in a textbook as I speed walk to class is an effective way for clearing oncoming pedestrian traffic.

Lastly, this isn't related to my apartment, but the Beijing Wal-mart is selling out. Grocery shopping in China is a unique experience, and shouldn't be spoiled. In spite of the zoo of Beijing customers who wield shopping carts in the same carefree, lawless fashion as Beijing taxi drivers wield their Volkswagens, there's always been a placid environment. This is thanks to one man: Kenny G.

To foreigners living in China, the nation's love for Kenny G is legendary. Not only do his smooth jazz sounds fill every supermarket from Shanghai to Sichuan, you can even hear him at the Great Wall, his saxophone faintly crooning from a far-off PA.

But last Friday, Wal-Mart decided to change the Kenny G CD for the hard rock sounds of Linkin Park. The best way of describing Linkin Park's music is that if it came on the radio in the car, my Mum would change the station in about .3 seconds. Thankfully, two tracks later, Kenny G came back and restored my Zen.

China's latest environmental initiative, which I don't think has received much Western press, is banning plastic bags. Well, stores are banned for giving them away for free, but you can buy them for 0.3 kuai (less than 5 cents). It looks like the initiative's worked well- I see a lot of people bringing their own bags, and even the people who buy plastic bags try to cram as many groceries into as few bags as possible.

Lastly, the air quality is continuing problem here, but I can't make up my mind about it. Some days, like today, the weather is absolutely perfect, and aside from some very, very light haze that's visible in front of far away buildings, Beijing's completely normal. Yet on other days, it looks like the apocalypse is imminent. I really hope for Beijing's sake, and for the athletes' sake, that they get some good weather. Less than 30 days to go!