It’s been quite a while since my last blog post, a month in fact.  There are a number of reasons for this.  At the beginning of July our landlord appears to have started work on renovating the apartment upstairs.  We are on the 17th floor, the one above is the uppermost flat and occupies two floors.  There appears to have been a lot of work to do – now 4 weeks on, they are still at it and the sound of drilling and hammering is not very conducive to sitting down and writing.  It has also been very hot: brutally hot.  Every day for the past week, the temperature has, as now, reached 38°C by 3pm.  The weather forecast says that this will feel like 45°C, but I’m not sure why.  Can anyone tell me?  I am familiar with the idea of a wind chill lowering the feel of a temperature, but what is going on here?  Is it that the wind will make you feel as if you are standing in front of a blast furnace, because that is what is feels like out there.  Fortunately we have air conditioning which is cooling the apartment down to much more acceptable levels, but there are many poorer Chinese in city who live in older accommodation who do not have the benefit of such luxury.  How do they manage to do anything? I’ve done a full day’s workout just going to the local Carrefour and dragging my full granny shopping basket home again and that’s after waiting until the sun has gone down.

I have also not been writing, as I have been planning.  This last week, because my son Charlie and his girlfriend Ella will be arriving next Tuesday to spend a fortnight with us.  Thankfully the weather forecast suggests that it is going to be a little cooler whilst they are here, which will make the packed two weeks I have planned for them so much easier.  They have a number of treats in store – some which are old favourites of ours and some which will be new to us too, so there will still be much for me to write about, even if it does take me quite a while to get fingers to the keyboard to tell you all about it.

I was also planning at the beginning of the month to make sure that my mid-July trip to the UK went as smoothly as possible.  I have been back a week now and apart from the heat I have been readjusting to life back in China which seems to take me a week or so to do.  This is not just jet-lag: this is adjusting to cultural differences and the overall silliness in the way somethings are organised over here.  Take this road junction for example:

Where the Hongqiao Rd meets Yan’an West Road

Where the Hongqiao Road meets Yan’an West Road and Gubei Lu

where the double track Hongqiao Road meets the double track Yan’an West Road, meets our road the Gubei Road, all underneath the orange Yan’an Elevated Road just north of our apartment, and where most normal town planners anywhere in the world would have put in a roundabout.  Not in China.  If you are going north up the Gubei Road and want to get onto either Yan’an Road, elevated or otherwise, you turn right onto Hongqiao Road, along which you drive for a couple of hundred yards and where all the traffic is halted at some lights.  Your lane then drives around the halted traffic doing a 180° turn, just as the red taxi and others are doing in this picture, so that you can then drive back along the Hongqiao Road to the junction in order to turn right right again onto the Yan’an Road.  It’s not as if there isn’t the space for a roundabout in the middle of the junction as this satellite picture will

Satellite view of the junction

testify, it’s just that they haven’t put one in:

Ignore the fact that it gives the location of the Hongqiao State Guesthouse as being slap-bang in the middle of the junction and that the ghosts of the roads have nothing to do with what is on the satellite  – that’s part and parcel of the satellite and the road maps for China being out of sync, which has caused us problems on numerous occasions and is just another quirky madness of this place.

I was confronted with another piece of Chinese madness this week.  I’ve planned to take Charlie and Ella to the Shanghai Art Museum next week, and although it is free you still need to have tickets.  I found out that you have to apply for tickets online.  But you can only do so 48 hours before you want to go to the museum.  And you then have to go and collect the tickets 24 hours beforehand from one of six named places in Shanghai, such as at The Shanghai Grand Theatre.  So I have to order them on Monday, go into central Shanghai on Tuesday making a detour on my way to the airport to meet Charlie and Ella and go and collect the tickets for a timed entrance within a two hour time slot the following day at the art gallery after we have taken the two youngsters to the local police station to register that they are staying with us (which we have to do within 24 hours of their arrival in town).  If I chose any other day to go I’d have to find time in our itinerary to go and get said tickets.  This is all clearly explained with screenshots of the museum’s Chinese-only website with what to fill in where, including your passport number, in a TimeOut Shanghai article from October 2012…… I suspect the system has probably changed since then.  I suspect you are hearing the groans from this end as I write.

My fortnight’s trip back to the UK went as smoothly as I could have expected, except I failed to get to Malvern to see my father.  The day after I arrived, I went to Maidenhead station to pick up all the tickets I had ordered online and was assured that despite there being a First Great Western strike on that day and the following, I would be able to get to Malvern in time for

The Tamar Bridge

lunch on the next day as I had planned.  The following day I got as far as Reading before being told that I could only get to Malvern by changing at Bristol and then Cheltenham arriving by 3pm – hardly in time for the lunch date I had with my father.  Later on in my trip on my way down to Cornwall I couldn’t help thinking that the great man (IK Brunel) that built the Great Western Railway and this bridge would be turning in his grave at the thought of a strike on his beloved system. Just a thought I wonder if the name Kingdom will ever become fashionable again?  Or Isambard for that matter. A search on Google tells me that it is derived from the Old German name Isanbert, common in 8th Century south-western Germany and means “glittering iron” and came to England with the Anglo-Saxons, but fell out of favour at the time of the Norman Conquest.  How apt! But Isambard inherited it from his father who was in fact born in Normandy.  How did they know?  I wonder – did the name make the man?

Statue of Sir Nicholas Winton

More train stuff this time from Maidenhead station: the statue of Sir Nicholas Winton on a Maidenhead platform famous for  organising with his mother the Czech Kinder-transport was nicely garnished with flowers following his recent death.  I used the trains quite a bit whilst in the UK, to make all the travelling around somewhat easier.  Apart from the planned to trip to Malvern I used the trains to go down to Falmouth to see my son Charlie who was until very recently a Chef

The Shed, Falmouth with lunch cooked by my son

de Partie at The Shed at Falmouth Harbour next to the National Maritime Museum and where I spent a couple of days feeling that I was actually on holiday.  Then I went up to

Old Reekie – The City not my aunt!

Rosalind Miller BA Hons (1st Class) in Chinese (Classical & Modern)

Edinburgh to see my recently widowed aunt whom we had promised to see before we left for China, but then with our departure being brought forward by two weeks at the last minute had to abandon.  From there I went down to Wimbledon to see my godson and his mother who was my bridesmaid 25 years ago and then back into central London to see my daughter graduate with First Class Honours with a BA in Chinese (Classical and Modern) from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) of the University of London.

Apart from the train journeys I picked up tights, baby milk, a toddler’s harness disguised as a backpack, some shortbread and some maltesers, sheets, 2 pairs of trousers, pyjamas, went to three banks and posted a parcel all for people here in China as well as doing my own shopping for a peeler and a fancy new iPhone that should work in China amongst other things.  I saw friends in Northamptonshire and Bedford and in Kent.  I also saw the gardener, the builder, the hairdresser, the tree surgeon and our cats whilst in Kent and picked up a Chinese fish bowl from home and took it down to West Dean near Goodwood in West Sussex for it to be mended.  I helped my father-in-law with his new washer/dryer – I hope he has now got the hang of it, and with Skype, although I don’t think he has got the hang of that.  I tried to get Vodafone to give me my PAC code for my iPhone that doesn’t work in China, but to no avail, despite several phone calls from me and from Richard in China.

It was lovely to see everyone, but I did have to come back to Shanghai for a rest………..