Eric's Beijing Diary

Busted my belt buckle, so I had to make a new one. I'm running out of coat hangers. I have plenty of hangers, but I mean the old steel kind that you can use for fixing your bicycle or something. The hangers you buy in China are OK for hanging a shirt on, but that's all they're good for.

I am going to go to Michael's home for Spring Festival. I finally decided to go to Guizhou Province and check out the new school that Dr. Sun is building there. In all my trips to western China, I have never been to Guizhou Province, and I have never been to western China at all in the winter time. Winter is when the western mountains get all the snow and rain that make them such a beautiful place to be in the summer. I have always felt that going to the western mountains in the summer, and living in Beijing the rest of the year gives you the best of both worlds. If I move to Guizhou, I will be living there, which will be quite a bit different from a summer trip. China south of the river does not have the default hot water radiators that are standard in buildings in the north, so there is no heat in the winter time. Dr. Sun's plan for compensating for this deficiency is to reverse the schedule--have summer vacation in December, January and February. That might take care of it, because Guizhou is in the south. By March, it should be warmed up quite a bit, or at least getting warmer.