When 5°C gets warm.

So apparently, once you've had your more-than-fair share of cooooold weather (-15°C) there comes a moment when you step out of the apartment and go back in quickly to take off your jacket, because it's WARM outside. Just in passing, you check the temperature on the internet: 5°C. Having lived in Holland, I know the glorious feeling of 15°C after the winter, but I had never considered that it would be possible to experience the same with only-just-above°C temperatures. Heck, these days I don't even notice the cold as much, even when it is the aforementioned ridiculously-cold cold. It becomes a part of life to be largely ignored except for in the conversations regarding weather ('tā mā de lěng!'- don't look that one up on google translate). There are some nasty little diseases going around our group of outsiders, probably because we miss all kinds of vital defence systems Chinese people can count on. This week has not been particularly my week, and I must admit that every now and then I dream of being in a warm, beautiful, colourful and natural place. Beijing can be so grey and ugly, and whatever plant existed is now a silhouette of grime-encrusted twigs- the pollution gets everywhere. 

But I have some things to catch up on, so here we go!

Thanks to everyone who congratulated me on my birthday, the 31st of January. It felt pretty weird to celebrate my birthday so far away from all of my family and by far most of my friends. As a natural consequence, I had the slightest birthday-blues in the morning- but before night I managed to collect a group of about twenty people to go eat dinner with in Dongzhimen (there are lots of restaurants there). Afterwards, I went out with a whole lot of them in Sanlitun. It was a lot of fun, and although I still missed a lot of people 'back home' (wherever that may be), I enjoyed my 19th birthday quite a lot. I got a lot of nasty looks for saying I was feeling old! ^^

About a week later we went to KTV. To those of you who do not know the phenomenon that is KTV yet, I'll start off with what I know about KTV. KTV is karaoke in private rooms, and it is apparently more or less the favourite pastime of Chinese people- they go there for parties and get together to drink just a little (Chinese people are notoriously easily drunk) and sing (terribly). It doesn't really matter at all how well you sing, which in my opinion makes sense since I would barely be able to read the Chinese lyrics on time. Apparently, KTV is regarded as a bit higher-class than going to a bar- in the sense that if you are looking for a 'decent' Chinese girl, you shouldn't be looking for them in bars. The cool thing about Chinese people is that instead of being judgemental towards 'us western girls' (who would go to bars as a normal social activity) they amend their statements regarding the decency of girls in bars with 'but of course in your culture it is different'. Anyway, we showed up at a KTV not far from the U. school with what turned out to be a massive 35 people. You might enjoy picturing a cute clerk relaxing a bit, handing out rooms to customers when suddenly he sees a few foreigners come it. An unusual sight- foreigners wouldn't go to KTV, certainly not in this area. A few more of the aliens trickle in, until the entire lobby is filled to the brim with clearly-not-Chinese people speaking a myriad of languages seemingly randomly. We caused quite the commotion.
We were divided into two rooms: One big one and one small one. At the beginning everyone stayed in the big room- there was quite a lot of room if you squished in, and small rooms are way too private. It is an interesting fact that until some alcohol shows up absolutely no-one is willing to sing solo- but after an hour or so we got the hang of it and were having a blast with terrible renditions of Beatles' songs and assorted rap music (who chose that anyway?). Eventually, though, I had to leave the large room since there are quite a lot of smokers amongst U. school members and the room was growing grey with the stuff. I went off to the smaller room, where the fun really began: Since there were only a few people, you got to sing all you wanted all alone, and you could even choose your own songs. All in all, a lot of fun, and I would like to do it a lot more often, even if the next day your voice is completely gone.


Oh, big news! Today it rained. Since I couldn't sleep (I wouldn't be writing this otherwise) I went out for a midnight walk around the city. (Dear parents, I'm still alive so shhhhh. I love you.) There are two things special about it raining today. One is that it is not ice, but water coming down from the sky- indicating a slooooow appearance of what will probably be the hottest summer of my life. The second is simply that it is raining 'an sich'. It's the first time it has rained since I came to Beijing 1,5 months ago. Rain has a redeeming quality that one might easily forget when cursing it back in Holland- the sky and the earth smell just a slightly bit fresher, black tiles outside turn out to be white after all. Beijing is truly the safest city I have ever known. There is no other city in the world I would go for a walk alone at this hour, even in busy parts of cities, even when I actually understand what people are saying. Obviously I'm still careful and my radars are up, but really I am very impressed at how safe you can feel in this city. I get the feeling that it has a lot to do with alcohol-and-drugs intake. Whilst Chinese people usually get drunk quite easily, it is not the scary, aggressive kind of drunk one might see in for example Europe. Oops... I'm sorry if my observations sound terribly racist- obviously I am oversimplifying everything I see around me for the sake of distilling differences and similarities. It might simply be a case of control from the government- it would probably be unnerving to know the statistics on how many cameras populate Beijing. Either way, it does one good to take a late-night walk around Beijing whilst it rains just a little. The city is almost peaceful at this time, almost beautiful. I can almost feel at home. Could this ever be my real home? I don't think so. It's too difficult to assimilate, too difficult to contact people even when you speak a little Chinese. The pollution is horrible, the weather weird and different. But... I could feel at ease. I'm working on getting guitar lessons and teaching English, I'm keeping my house clean and working on making my room cozy. In short, I'm creating a little life for me right here. They say 'when you are at peace with yourself any place is home' and I agree. When I'm fine, Beijing is fine. When I'm not okay, nowhere would be okay. I like to keep it in mind. Of course, some things help. This afternoon I saw a couple looking decidedly lost close to my home. I walked up to them and asked if I could help them. They were looking for nanluoguxiang. Now, nanluoguxiang is quite close to my apartment- it is a hutong which got popular and now has a collection of cute little shops, nice roads and uplifting bars- completely different from my hutong across the street, beiluoguxiang, where there are still only toilets outside houses and people live and work in rooms-anex-shops about 4 meters squared. Of course they were looking for nanluoguxiang. Funny (to me) was that they were already in nanluoguxiang- it is an area really, but it is very well known for one particular street. I was quite glad I stopped to ask whether they were okay, because a Chinese person would have never understood their pronunciation. And you can imagine my pride when I was able to tell them: 'Go straight here and after a while you will see a sign on your left saying 'Pool Bar'. After that, go to the left and then walk straight for a while, and you will start seeing the shops you are looking for.'

Last but not least, I would like to tell you about last weekend. Anyone with a weak or sentimental heart might want to skip this part. Last weekend on saturday I went with a small group of people from the U. school to a place about an hour away from Beijing where a couple lives with about 10 adoptive children, all with some kind of handicap. The neighbourhood was surprisingly beautiful- nice, large buildings, clean streets, a relaxed atmosphere and parks with trees, water and grass- apparently living just outside Beijing is so much cheaper than living in Beijing that even middle-class people can afford to live at this luxurious standard of life. And believe me, it is luxury in its own way. The couple and children lived in an apartment there. The sight of handicapped children is always very saddening of course, but I was amazed personally at how much care was being given there. Some of the children were really young and couldn't even move by themselves, but had to be picked up and carried around. Some children seemed physically fine but clearly had some difficulty speaking or 'being sociable'. The most shocking sight was that of a little boy, with scars all over his face, head, arms and hands. His hands were also disfigured. I later heard form a friend at the U. school that the most probable explanation for his scars was that his parents had deemed him an unfit child and had (too gruesome for words) set the child on fire and left him for dead, after which he had been found by other people. Since I haven't been able to find much information on the subject on the internet (and I didn't want to ask) I am keeping the less horrific option open of a (rare) (skin) disease which caused the little boy's parents to abandon him. Either way it was really horrible. Sometimes I am confronted with more than I think I can handle. I have some other stories that I might share some other time; for now this was more than enough. Anyway, whilst part of our group set out to clean and organise the apartment, three of us (moi inclus) volunteered to teach English to three young kids. 
English is important here in China, and the parents are very interested in the kids learning it. Since my Chinese was the best of the three (haha... that sounds so funny to me) I didn't have much trouble explaining little exercises and translating simple Chinese to simple English. Kids are the best to talk to- they don't have pronounced accents yet and speak using simple words, so they are easy to understand. At the same time, they are open-minded about grammar and pronunciation mistakes, unlike adults. I even designed a few tricks, working from Chinese, for words she couldn't seem to remember. 日, meaning sun, is conveniently pronounced just like the 'r' from red, so it made for a nice memory aid. Outside in Chinese is 外, 'wai', pronounced just like the beginning of of the word white (the weather was cloudy, haha).
The little girl I was teaching was so sweet and hard-working. It's such an eye-opener to think about how her life would be back in Holland. She wouldn't have to rely on charity to survive. I think sometimes we take for granted what it means to be rich. It's not TV's and cars we should be counting, but lives that are happy and safe, people that can't take care of themselves and that we as a collective take care of. It might just be the greatest gift of our society, and we seem to forget it sometimes.

This little boy had 'stolen' a camera from one of my friends before, to which she had reacted a tad nervously (of course it was a nice camera so I completely understood). Since my camera is nearly broken and since I care more about a happy kid than my camera and all the pictures inside it, I lent the little boy my camera, showing him to put the cord around his arm in the process. It turned out to be a blessing- he walked around taking pictures of absolutely everything, even things I would have been ashamed to take pictures of, such as the younger children with little mobility and the toilet. He was good at it too! I even managed to explain how he could look at the pictures he had just taken, which is quite the task for such a young kid. All in all, it was a very fulfilling albeit tiring day. 
Other than the kids I mentioned, I also met a little girl proudly wearing a new hearing aid that immediately became my friend when I danced along to some little tune coming from a toy piano. Some pictures here ;-).
So I'm up to date! I'm sorry for the huge post. I'll try to write more regularly from now on, but that tends not to work out properly. I'm really tired now, so I'll check the grammar and spelling tomorrow, I hope the mistakes aren't too terrible. Good night!
Love, Sophie.