Monday, April 26, 2004
SPRING COMES TO HUAIROU
See photos about this week's posting in the Yahoo photo album. (Will open in a new browser window.)
Ah, spring! That most elusive of seasons, longed for in the depths of a dark cold winter; hinted at with zephyrs of warmth only to be snatched away by yet another blast of Siberian cold; imagined in the swelling of buds on a bare branch only to be negated by the drab brown of the grass and last year’s dead foliage blowing in the wind.
Although we haven’t had the constant ebb and flow of the pack ice off the shore of Coffin Cove to dash our hopes for an early spring, we’ve had the many fluctuations in temperatures - yet one more blast from the north- to temper our expectations. That combined with the cruelty of turning off the heat in all buildings in the middle of March has made us most anxious for any sign of spring and, more importantly, of warmth!
However, by the end of March, with a few warm days, the forsythia were in full bloom, a most welcome brightness against the dark brown grass and bare tree trunks along the main street. Soon the buds on the many magnolia trees here had inched open, testing the weather for a general all clear to bloom. And bloom they have - wonderful pure whites, pale pinks and dark reds to brighten our spirits, despite the continuing morgue-quality cold of our apartment. An afternoon sandstorm from Mongolia shredded many of the blooms, and turned others to brown as it passed. But we were beginning to feel that spring was going to win, at last. A long bed of day lilies which Judy had been watching for weeks, began to send up bright green shoots, which have grown into huge clumps in the past few weeks, despite the fact that several motorcycles have run up onto the sidewalk and into the beds as their drivers attempted to make a U-turn on the narrow street.
Now, in the third week of April, spring is bursting. Huairou’s main streets are planted with numerous flowering trees - cherries, plums, crab apples – which have been loaded with flowers growing tightly to the trees’ branches. Flowering almond bushes, and lately yellow briar roses have added more colour to the scene. Sycamores and large willows are dripping with the bright green of their first spring leaves. And the poplars, which seem to be everywhere, are in leaf and in blossom. The fluffy white flowers fill the air. Ken has named this wind drifted whiteness “Chinese snow”. The fluff floats lazily in through the open classroom windows, eddies in the hallway breezes and trails across the floor in Judy’s office building, where several poplar trees line the school property facing onto the street. One of our students, Jing Xin, was telling us that this fluff can be quite a fire hazard, since it piles up at the curb along streets. If someone were to drop a lighted cigarette into the fluff, it will catch fire easily and could leap to nearby buildings, causing great damage. Breathing in the fluff certainly gets in the way of classroom work, as Judy can attest from having had a coughing spell in class one day as a result of inadvertently inhaling some of it.
Where there had been dry earth there are now clumps of hostas ringing the trees in the nearby park. The many rose plants around town are in full leaf, as are the ornamental trees which line the wide boulevards along Dragon Hill Street. Lilac bushes provide their lovely perfume, a strong reminder of the lilacs in our garden at home. At the school, great bushes of bleeding hearts and Chinese tree peonies are in bloom. On the long arbor in the courtyard of Ken and Keyan’s building, a mass of pale blue wisteria blossoms hang decoratively among their green leaves. And the plants sheltered in the school greenhouse all winter have been moved out to the main square in front of the Science Bldg. Oleanders and palms, large ornamental cacti (like our Harriet) as well as varieties we don’t recognize are now decorating the main driveway. A regular watering routine has begun throughout the city -- we’ve still had no rain to speak of since mid-February.
Spring seems to be the season for kite flying. In Huairou there are colourful kites for sale in the small shops along the street. Students fly kites in the school playground. The most popular place for kite flying here is in the now dry spillway for the reservoir. This is a long riverbed with reinforced stone banks, once a necessity for the volume of water in the reservoir. Now it’s totally dry and used for grazing sheep. With no overhead wires or trees, this makes a perfect kite-flying site -- especially on the weekends, when children and their patient parents struggle valiantly to get a kite aloft. And when we were in BJ last week, we noticed that the air above Tian An Men Square was filled with colourful kites of every style. Those with extremely long tails seemed the most popular.
Everyone has moved outside in the recent warm weather. Card games are a regular feature in the nearby park, and Chinese chess continues without a break in front of the fruit vendor’s stall at the corner. Taxi drivers lounge in their cars with the doors wide open to catch the breeze. And Chinese men have resumed their strange habit of hiking up their shirts to reveal their bare middles when the day is particularly hot. We’ve yet to see them hike up their pants as well, but that will also happen in due time. The dog walking, a very popular past time on our street, continues on a daily basis, but the pace is much slower, and there’s always the chance to visit and get caught up on the latest gossip with friends. The pool table on the corner is in constant use, and once again, we go to bed at night to the sound of pool balls hitting each other.
And as happens at home, spring is the time for road repairs. Last weekend a huge gang of workers arrived with pick axes, shovels and mallets to remove crumbled asphalt where bumps and dips in the road had developed. No pneumatic drills here -- instead, one worker placed an axe on the road surface and a second hit the top of the axe with a mallet. A slow but effective way to break up the asphalt. And the traffic continued to flow around the work, drivers often driving right over the florescent orange cones which had been set up to mark off the repair site. The next day the asphalt arrived, and now the dips and bumps are gone, replaced by new black asphalt rectangles. Two major works projects have been underway in our neighbourhood. The long block between our street and the main intersection has been totally torn up and is now being reset with quarried paving stones - a huge job which has caused many traffic jams and confusion. However, the workers continue steadily, in the beginning working through the night to smooth the cement which forms the base for the pavers. And the stores along this section are also being refurbished. The big department store (Huairou Bai Hua Da Lu - ‘Huairou 100 products Big Store) on the corner is getting a total face-lift. Yesterday on our way home, we watched two men high up on the steel supports for the store’s sign, sawing down the Chinese letters one by one. We couldn’t watch for long because their perch was so precarious, nothing but thin metal rods to hang on to!
At the reservoir, workers have just about finished a new wall which runs along the sidewalk there. In the past few years, there has apparently been a move to block general access to the shores of the reservoir, first with wire fences and now with stone walls. This is to prevent people from polluting the water.
However, people just climb the wall and the fence, although this approach is only for the hardy.
Petunias, marigolds and sedums have been arranged in attractive patterns in the plaza in front of the International Conference Centre. And when we came home from school yesterday, workers were trying out the large fountain there -- a very popular attraction on summer evenings, when it swishes and spurts to flashing lights and the beat of music.
And Judy has ventured forth on Keyan’s bicycle – a sure sign of spring! However, she goes very carefully. Riding a bike in China is very, very different from riding a bike from Harkaway House to Leith!
See photos about this week's posting in the Yahoo photo album. (Will open in a new browser window.)
Ah, spring! That most elusive of seasons, longed for in the depths of a dark cold winter; hinted at with zephyrs of warmth only to be snatched away by yet another blast of Siberian cold; imagined in the swelling of buds on a bare branch only to be negated by the drab brown of the grass and last year’s dead foliage blowing in the wind.
Although we haven’t had the constant ebb and flow of the pack ice off the shore of Coffin Cove to dash our hopes for an early spring, we’ve had the many fluctuations in temperatures - yet one more blast from the north- to temper our expectations. That combined with the cruelty of turning off the heat in all buildings in the middle of March has made us most anxious for any sign of spring and, more importantly, of warmth!
However, by the end of March, with a few warm days, the forsythia were in full bloom, a most welcome brightness against the dark brown grass and bare tree trunks along the main street. Soon the buds on the many magnolia trees here had inched open, testing the weather for a general all clear to bloom. And bloom they have - wonderful pure whites, pale pinks and dark reds to brighten our spirits, despite the continuing morgue-quality cold of our apartment. An afternoon sandstorm from Mongolia shredded many of the blooms, and turned others to brown as it passed. But we were beginning to feel that spring was going to win, at last. A long bed of day lilies which Judy had been watching for weeks, began to send up bright green shoots, which have grown into huge clumps in the past few weeks, despite the fact that several motorcycles have run up onto the sidewalk and into the beds as their drivers attempted to make a U-turn on the narrow street.
Now, in the third week of April, spring is bursting. Huairou’s main streets are planted with numerous flowering trees - cherries, plums, crab apples – which have been loaded with flowers growing tightly to the trees’ branches. Flowering almond bushes, and lately yellow briar roses have added more colour to the scene. Sycamores and large willows are dripping with the bright green of their first spring leaves. And the poplars, which seem to be everywhere, are in leaf and in blossom. The fluffy white flowers fill the air. Ken has named this wind drifted whiteness “Chinese snow”. The fluff floats lazily in through the open classroom windows, eddies in the hallway breezes and trails across the floor in Judy’s office building, where several poplar trees line the school property facing onto the street. One of our students, Jing Xin, was telling us that this fluff can be quite a fire hazard, since it piles up at the curb along streets. If someone were to drop a lighted cigarette into the fluff, it will catch fire easily and could leap to nearby buildings, causing great damage. Breathing in the fluff certainly gets in the way of classroom work, as Judy can attest from having had a coughing spell in class one day as a result of inadvertently inhaling some of it.
Where there had been dry earth there are now clumps of hostas ringing the trees in the nearby park. The many rose plants around town are in full leaf, as are the ornamental trees which line the wide boulevards along Dragon Hill Street. Lilac bushes provide their lovely perfume, a strong reminder of the lilacs in our garden at home. At the school, great bushes of bleeding hearts and Chinese tree peonies are in bloom. On the long arbor in the courtyard of Ken and Keyan’s building, a mass of pale blue wisteria blossoms hang decoratively among their green leaves. And the plants sheltered in the school greenhouse all winter have been moved out to the main square in front of the Science Bldg. Oleanders and palms, large ornamental cacti (like our Harriet) as well as varieties we don’t recognize are now decorating the main driveway. A regular watering routine has begun throughout the city -- we’ve still had no rain to speak of since mid-February.
Spring seems to be the season for kite flying. In Huairou there are colourful kites for sale in the small shops along the street. Students fly kites in the school playground. The most popular place for kite flying here is in the now dry spillway for the reservoir. This is a long riverbed with reinforced stone banks, once a necessity for the volume of water in the reservoir. Now it’s totally dry and used for grazing sheep. With no overhead wires or trees, this makes a perfect kite-flying site -- especially on the weekends, when children and their patient parents struggle valiantly to get a kite aloft. And when we were in BJ last week, we noticed that the air above Tian An Men Square was filled with colourful kites of every style. Those with extremely long tails seemed the most popular.
Everyone has moved outside in the recent warm weather. Card games are a regular feature in the nearby park, and Chinese chess continues without a break in front of the fruit vendor’s stall at the corner. Taxi drivers lounge in their cars with the doors wide open to catch the breeze. And Chinese men have resumed their strange habit of hiking up their shirts to reveal their bare middles when the day is particularly hot. We’ve yet to see them hike up their pants as well, but that will also happen in due time. The dog walking, a very popular past time on our street, continues on a daily basis, but the pace is much slower, and there’s always the chance to visit and get caught up on the latest gossip with friends. The pool table on the corner is in constant use, and once again, we go to bed at night to the sound of pool balls hitting each other.
And as happens at home, spring is the time for road repairs. Last weekend a huge gang of workers arrived with pick axes, shovels and mallets to remove crumbled asphalt where bumps and dips in the road had developed. No pneumatic drills here -- instead, one worker placed an axe on the road surface and a second hit the top of the axe with a mallet. A slow but effective way to break up the asphalt. And the traffic continued to flow around the work, drivers often driving right over the florescent orange cones which had been set up to mark off the repair site. The next day the asphalt arrived, and now the dips and bumps are gone, replaced by new black asphalt rectangles. Two major works projects have been underway in our neighbourhood. The long block between our street and the main intersection has been totally torn up and is now being reset with quarried paving stones - a huge job which has caused many traffic jams and confusion. However, the workers continue steadily, in the beginning working through the night to smooth the cement which forms the base for the pavers. And the stores along this section are also being refurbished. The big department store (Huairou Bai Hua Da Lu - ‘Huairou 100 products Big Store) on the corner is getting a total face-lift. Yesterday on our way home, we watched two men high up on the steel supports for the store’s sign, sawing down the Chinese letters one by one. We couldn’t watch for long because their perch was so precarious, nothing but thin metal rods to hang on to!
At the reservoir, workers have just about finished a new wall which runs along the sidewalk there. In the past few years, there has apparently been a move to block general access to the shores of the reservoir, first with wire fences and now with stone walls. This is to prevent people from polluting the water.
However, people just climb the wall and the fence, although this approach is only for the hardy.
Petunias, marigolds and sedums have been arranged in attractive patterns in the plaza in front of the International Conference Centre. And when we came home from school yesterday, workers were trying out the large fountain there -- a very popular attraction on summer evenings, when it swishes and spurts to flashing lights and the beat of music.
And Judy has ventured forth on Keyan’s bicycle – a sure sign of spring! However, she goes very carefully. Riding a bike in China is very, very different from riding a bike from Harkaway House to Leith!
All text and photography © copyright Harkaway, 2003 - 2004
