We Move From The Stink Of Luanda To The Smog Of Beijing

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After spending a year in Angola, which sadly ended with us falling foul of the Director and Principle of the school (two of the most unpleasant people I have ever met), it was obvious that we would have to move on.

Part of our falling foul of those two involved me storming into the Director's office and gently informing him that if he didn't stop hassling Lotty I would deck him - meaning every word I said, which he, sensibly, believed.

Lotty managed to get herself work in a new international school in Beijing (Beijing City International School) so we left Angola and did a totally ludicrous trip around the world, going to Australia, followed by going to France, and then England, and then Holland and then to China.   I got the feeling we spent the entire summer holiday in airports and planes - but we did manage to see a lot of good friends and family in between the planes happily, and duly arrived in Beijing.

Having spent a part of my childhood in Singapore, and having an uncle who had been a staunch believer in Mao, and who had stayed in Beijing working in the university throughout the Cultural Revolution, which he, the idiot, supported, I felt I understood the Chinese and China... How wrong I was!

We spent three intriguing and enjoyable years there, and did a fair amount of wandering around the country, but I wouldn't dream of claiming anything other than a very superficial knowledge and feeling about that immense and complex country. 

We arrived late in the evening at Beijing, to be met by one of the Chinese HR staff from the school Lotty would be working in, who took us to our new home, on the ground floor of a 25 story block of flats in a park full of such towers.  All brand new and being built by the guy who owned and had built the school that Lotty was about to work in.   Something of a shock to us, never having lived in anything remotely like that before.

And then the next morning, when we woke up and looked out of the kitchen window, bursting to get our first look at Beijing we discovered its main characteristic - smog.  The sky was a sort of dirty greenish grey colour, and was low enough to conceal the top five or six floors of the towers around us.  And it burnt our throats too.

Not a happy introduction to Beijing.   We sort of gazed in horrid fascination at this horror and wondered what on earth we were doing in such a place.

Luanda was filthy, but it was simple human filth, this was something else, chemical filth.  Luanda's filth smelt awful, but did no actual harm, this Chinese filth could destroy your lungs and God knows what else.

However, over the following months we came to understand and even love Beijing and the Chinese, and I went so far as to get my head down and set to to learn to speak, read (but not write) Mandarin - A totally fascinating language I discovered, more about that in a later post.

While we were in china, we had no end of adventures, some good, some less so, all of which I will write about shortly - suffice it to say for now that among other things they were: 
  • getting arrested in the extreme north west of China, 
  • riding camels into one of the world's largest - and least known deserts, the Taklamakan Desert (Have you ever heard of it?  It is bigger than the Sahara too...   ), 
  • wandering on various sections of the Great wall, but never on the badly restored section that most people see, 
  • cycling along the river Li surrounded by those weird pointy mountains you see in all those old Chinese paintings
  • Skiing near Inner Mongolia,
  • Performing in A Peking Opera (the Monkey King)
 And a whole load of other things.

So keep an eye on this blog if you are interested to learn of the Chinese Adventures of two Round Eyes in China.

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