Old Man Winter I was prepared to freeze this winter in Beijing. Everyone I talked with before I came told me how uncomfortable I would be. I have a friend in California who described a bone-chilling visit to the Great Wall near Beijing in January. "My God, the wind!" he said. "It just goes right through you! I've never been so cold in my life!" People tend to dramatize weather, of course, and exaggerate. But the guide books also warned me of the perils of the Beijing climate -- steaming hot and humid in the summer, they said, and bitterly cold in the winter. Everyone mentioned terrible winds. Winds that not only froze your marrow, but blew choking yellow dust from the northern deserts of Mongolia. It sounded positively inhuman. Even the history books I read seemed to emphasize the horrors of Chinese winters -- the Long March of 1934 - 1935, for instance, where untold thousands died in the snow. It was positively chilling. I wasn't coming to China for a Club Med vacation, but because this country has fascinated me all my life. Still I was worried, and I arrived in the early autumn ready for anything Mother Nature might throw my way. My wife and I came equipped with long underwear, sweaters, thermal vests, ski socks, neck warmers, gloves and wool hats. In early December I bought a heavy, duck-down jacket at the Silk Market, and a few more sweaters for good luck. If the worst came to worst, I imagined I could put everything on at once -- the multi-layered strategy. It might be difficult to fit through doorways, but I would be warm. Imagine my disappointment when December passed without a single instance of frostbite -- hardly even any frost. Oh, the temperature dipped below freezing at night, but the days climbed up to 40 degrees fahrenheit or so. Nothing to write home about. Not even very much wind. Finally a Chinese friend admitted that the winters in Beijing had been getting steadily warmer in the past ten years. Perhaps it was local pollution, or changing global weather patterns -- there were many theories, but no one could say for certain.
The "snow storm" -- about an inch and a half, I would estimate -- was followed by a week of frigid air. But for January weather, this was not nearly as bad as what I've experienced in New York City, and it certainly didn't begin to compare with the cold which has blanketed Europe this winter. Today the sun is shining brightly and the thermometer is hovering around the freezing mark. Even in the bad years, Beijing winters are brief and in a month or so, the temperatures will start their annual swing towards summer. So most of my woolly wardrobe remains unused in the closet. I feel a little foolish about it, really. But now my friends are starting to warn me about the terrors of spring. "Just wait until you see what the wind is like in March!" they say. I'm not holding my breath. Next Week: Shop Until You Drop, Part II From the Editor in Chief: If you have some travel or work experience in China to share with us, we will be very excited to hear from you! Send your feedback by e-mail or regular mail to ASM Overseas Corporation. Thank you! And if you liked this column, please check Expats In China (International Community in China) for more interesting and useful information on life in China as a foreigner, including calendar of events, entertainment, housing, employment, classifieds, personal, etc. |
Finally it snowed on the last day of the old year, and then a week later in January. The temperature dipped, and it seemed as if winter had really arrived. The snow was very pretty, and all over Beijing you could see people taking photographs of one another -- my wife and I did the same. There were even a few snowmen built here and there. The only bad part of the weather was the fiendishly slippery streets. China Daily, the English language newspaper, reported 100 traffic accidents related to the second snowfall, and 120 injury victims per day, over the snowy two-day period -- mostly pedestrians and bicyclists who needed to see a doctor after taking an icy fall.