There's no better time for procrastination than when you should be doing something else...

Well, well, two blogs in a week I bet you think that's pretty clever, don't you boy?
And if anyone get's that obscure reference, I'll buy them a chupachup.

A few days ago Caroline's bike got a flat tire.
Another beautiful feature of life in Beijing is that handymen hang out on street corners. They have little mobile workshops that can cut keys, repair shoes and other leather goods and fortunately for us; bikes too.
After spending about 45 minutes wheeling Caroline's bike all over the 'hood past three unoccupied handyman sites, I found one approximately 5 minutes from the door.

Anyway, he deftly identified the problem, whipped the valve out, shortened it with a very sharp piece of metal and pumped the tire back up again. He wanted something that on two hearings sounded like baisa, he must have had a strong provincial accent I guess. So I gave him Y20 (take off a zero for €/£) note in the hope it wouldn't be too small. It wasn't, he asked if I had anything smaller, so it must have been less than ten. However I figured since I was happy with the job and would have paid more, Y20 was a fair price.

Anyway, just a little detour to explain how easy it can be to get some otherwise awkward tasks done when there is a huge amount of labour knocking around.

I am currently toiling away with 3 jobs, so free time is scarce, hence the reduced number of blog posts. 2 Universities and 1 micro finance / sustainable enterprise if you're interested.

I had lunch with a student last week, during office hours when we meet up to talk about any academic questions they might have.
However, when we actually met she'd worked out the questions for herself and generally just wanted to gossip.
There was some vaguely salacious rumours about other lecturers, but I'm not too interested in that stuff, so mostly dismissed it.
However, she did mention something I thought that was quite interesting.
The students at my college have a lower college entrance exam score, so essentially their parents have to pay to get them on a course that includes foreign study.
So these kids tend to be the progeny of the relatively / very wealthy.
Sometimes see them driving round in luxury 4x4s, don't forget that for the many, China remains a developing country.

The rest of the students at the university are considerably poorer, representing as they do a cross-section of Chinese society.

So, apparently the rich kids think that sometimes when they go in the lecture theatre after the 'poor' kids, it sometimes "smells a bit funny".
However, they also know that all of those kids are there on merit and scored considerably higher in their exams.
It kind of levels out the playing field I think and stops the rich kids from being too snobby.
You should see the blackboard sometimes when we have a class after the boffins (that ones for you dad :-)
I often can't understand a word that's on there.
It is in Chinese of course...
No I jest, last week sometime they had been teaching astrophysics, in English! Measuring quarks, black holes and cetera.

So I'll end on this happy note:
The people with the top 5% of IQ in China outnumber every single person in the UK.

Bridal Life in China

This of course it very important for every bride, but in China, there is at least one extra layer to the Bridezilla business, mainly: the wedding pictures! Whilst in Europe it's considered bad luck if the husband sees the bridal dress before the wedding, in China all the wedding pictures are taken around 6 months in advance of the wedding (and are then put on the wedding invitations). I have wondered if there are ever couples that split up after the pictures but before the wedding and what happens to the pictures then. (I haven't found out yet, but I guess it will be good business for the photographer.)

My Chinese colleagues tell me that the pictures are alomst more improtant than the wedding, because you give them to your family and hang them up in your house (a very common idea is to have one picture blown up into a canvas and put on the wall, our neighbours have one).

The pictures are usually taken wearing the clothes provided by the photographer (so the groom doesn't actually see the wedding dress) and then you go out to the beautiful sights and get them taken. Hence, we have seen brides and grooms pretty much everywhere we have been that is worth taken a picture of: Suzhou, Forbidden City, Dalian waterfront and my personal favourite:at the Snow Festival in Harbin (see living proof below). My new hobby has become to take pictures of the brides (grooms are just not that interesting). Usually I would feel very bad doing this, but in China it's totally ok (especially considering the fact that pictures of us probably feature in dozens of Chinese households by now). Therefore, my aim is to collect hundreds of pictures over the next three years, and my absolute favourite of my so far ten pictures is the bride in the snow.

This poor girl was wearing a skinny dress and nothing but some lace over her arms and it was about -17 degrees. I was worried my fingers would fall off every time I quickly took a picture, but this girl was either already frozen or from Siberia!

So, over the next months, I may post some curious bridal pictures here. Of course, the question is whether Mark and I will get the cheesy photoshoot.... Well, you'll just have to wait and see!

Excuses, excuses

Hello everyone.
You may have noticed something recently.
Namely that we are rarely here.
It's been 17 days since our last post.
Unforgiveable.
The major reason is that Caroline is currently doing 2 full time jobs and I think I am fluctuating somewhere around 1.5
Between this and our continuing attempts to eat, drink, walk and visit our way around China; regular blogging has taken a bit of a blow.

So consider this a taster, I'll be back with a substantial post with pictures and everything at the weekend.
Also, that little box over to the right contains my tweets, which some people crappily refer to a micro-blogging. They do give a very brief but up-to-date reflection of my observations and thoughts on a day to day basis.

So at the weekend you can expect musings which may or may not be related to:
- Mutianyu
- Dalian
- What rich Chinese kids think of poor Chinese kids
- What Chinese kids think of the colonial history of Africa and Fair trade
- Whether Spring has hit Beijing
- How excited we are to have booked flights to Yangshuo

These and other exciting topics will be covered in the next post.
Now off to meet Caroline who has agreed to give a guest lecture to my students about the EU. Then this evening, we are attending a book chat with this fellow

Snow, snow, snow

It was probably all over the news across the world, because Beijing is in its dryest season of the year, yet: last week it snowed for more than 12 hours straight! And suddenly everything was white and even more beautiful. The way to work took about twice as long with trying to avoid cars bumbing into me and whoever decided to get a taxi that day got stuck in traffic for hours.

Now, the internet announced that this sudden white beauty was made in China, with silver-iodide having been shot into the sky. Hm, nothing wrong with that if it makes it proper winter as far as I'm concerned, but especially some Internet news thought it would be a good idea to condemn this practice straight away (apparently they#re is no danger to human). Obviously they didn't mention that this is common practice across the world, but I guess we can't expect too much. All I can say is that it looked beautiful and everyone was really happy here .....