CCCCCcccooolllllllddddd!

Now, being the final third of Autumn, the temperature is starting to drop in Beijing. Properly now, not like last time when I thought it was dropping! At the moment it's like a nice Canberra Winter day without the sunshine. Not too cold during the day but definitely cooling down at night. Pretty much overnight jackets, scarves, beanies and gloves started appearing on passersby which is a good sign that things are cooling down.

Another good sign is how cold it gets in the apartment. One of the niceties/annoyances of a fairly controlling government is that they decide when the heating comes on and not the people in the buildings themselves. This means that no matter the actual temperature, the heating comes on around the 15th of November and not before. Last year it was apparently absolutely freezing a few weeks before and the powers that be allowed the heating on for "testing" purposes but that's unlikely this year, it's not unseasonably cold. Just cold :)

Another byproduct of the seasonal changes that I'm sure I mentioned before is the leaves falling. We have a pond in our apartment complex surrounded by willow trees which are slowly losing their leaves. This must be the worst time of year for street sweepers, because they don't get any leeway just because the leaves are falling all the time. They're all out there constantly sweeping all the different bits around the city. Lucky there seems to be an army of them!

Anyway, the leaves don't really change colour in Beijing, apparently it's too dry for that but they do fall. They've also cleared away all the water plants from the pond, and as I noticed today, the ducks and swans have disappeared as well. I expect into someones dinner but maybe they just keep them somewhere else during the winter. They need to do this because the pond freezes over completely which is something I'm quite looking forward to.

Anyway, it used to look like this:

From Random China Photos

and now it looks like this:

From Random China Photos

Actually it still looks pretty green but trust me, they're thinning out!

Aside from being slightly colder in the apartment than we would like, things are going ok. We're planning trips away, Europe for Christmas and New Year, India for a wedding in early Feb and some other, more local trips too. Still getting along with the Mandarin, it's starting to stick a little more now and we've gotten as far as reading some (simple) paragraphs in Mandarin characters which is also a nice achievement. We're still a little short on useful words but we're managing to get by (we talked our way through getting a new inner on Jane's bike on the weekend, so that was quite nice).

As well as that, there are so many nice places around Beijing. On Saturday we went to a new shopping district just south of Tiananmen Square called Qianmen Avenue (well Big Street). It's much more of a modern take on traditional Chinese architecture than the other main shopping bit called Wangfujing:

From Random China Photos

From Random China Photos

It's still a little weird to see vaguely Chinese looking buildings with Swatch and Starbucks plastered on them but it was a nice spot. They also have a night market that only opens during the day so go figure :)