TO BEGIN..............

I suppose perhaps the best place to begin this new Blog is to talk a wee bit about where we actually live here in Beijing. After our less than happy experience of "compound" living in Luanda, I suppose how we now live is somewhat better. We still live in a compound, but this one is not cut off from the outside world as was the case in Luanda, there we lived in our own semi-detached little house in the school grounds, surrounded by other semi-detached houses which housed the other teachers. Now we live on the ground floor of a 23 floor block of flats, in a compound with about 10 of these blocks, all brand new and perfectly adequate for living, but not particularly interesting or inspiring. I have never been keen on the idea of living in a People Stack..... Anyhow, this is what it looks like, outside and inside.

OUR HUGE KITCHEN

TWO VIEWS OF OUR LITTLE SOUL SAVING GARDEN

BEDROOM

SITTING ROOM

SPARE ROOM

VIEW FROM GARDEN

VIEW UPWARDS FROM GARDEN.... NO COMMENT!!!!!

So, this may give you an idea of how we live here, or at least, where we live here. To be honest, before we arrived in Beijing, I had - naively perhaps - assumed that we would be living in something more like this...........

AHH.... DREAMS, DREAMS

But no, almost no one in modern Beijing lives in "Chinese" houses, we all live in tower blocks of varying quality.

I gather from people who have lived here for many years that Beijing used to be full of houses a bit like the one above, but that in the mania for rebuilding, almost all such structures have been pulled down and replaced with tower blocks. At least the new buildings have lavatories, which the old ones decidedly did not have, which is a real step forward for most people I feel. Living in a picturesque building would be fun, but one with no lavatory would have rather less charm for me, and I am sure almost all Chinese would agree with that feeling.

Until a few weeks ago, Beijing was one huge building site, tower blocks going up all around the city, machines working 24/7 and almost continual noise and dust from all this building work, happily we are experiencing a short period of peace and quiet, as all such work has been banned for the duration of the Olympics and the period leading up to them.... so all is currently quiet. A vast relief to me, as I was becoming very tired of being woken at 3 am by the hideous noise of scaffolding being unloaded from trucks about 50 meters from my bedroom window each night, or cement mixers roaring away at the same sort of time for hours on end.

This work ethic is probably very admirable, but I am afraid I feel that one can go too far with this sort of ethic... Give me the good old European feeling of "40 hours a week is enough for me Mate!" What ever else it might mean, it does at least mean peaceful nights.

Last thing about where we live, we are parked in the South East of the city, sort of, in an area called the Central Business District, which is quite handy. It means that we are about 45 minutes cycling time away from The Forbidden City (which to my shame I still have not visited) and thus the main centre of Beijing, so it is a convenient place to live. Especially so for Lotty, as the school she works in (Beijing City International School) is literally 4 minutes walk from our home. Sadly, the school I work in (more about which in later postings) is way to blazes up in the North Eastern corner of Beijing, well on the way to the main Airport, so it takes me about 90 minutes to get to work each day... ho hum.............................

And what was truly culturally confusing for me when we arrived here, there is a Carrefour Super Market about 5 minutes walk from our house, and for the Brits among you, a B&Q as well!

Never expected that!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

That is it for this posting, another one soon.