Beijing, Friday.
It’s getting colder in my office.
When I write the script this chronicle I have long underwear, double fleece sweaters and clipped mittens on me.
Because even if the temperature drops outdoors, winter has not officially started yet.
In any case, not according to the Beijing authorities, who turn on the indoor heat every year only in mid-November.
So it’s just biting, even though I’ve heard the sound of my rescue in recent days.
Water flowing through the pipes of my elements.
It is the local caretaker who tests the machinery. A sign that the heat is coming soon.
And this is the situation throughout northern China. A wait for winter to officially begin.
But the alternative, to live in southern China, is worse.
There is no central indoor heating.
The absolute coldest winter I experienced was a few years ago in the city of Kunming in the southern province of Yunnan.
Kunming is located at an altitude of two thousand meters and is often called “the city of eternal spring” for its stable temperature around 20 degrees.
But, a cold snap in February brought minus degrees and unusual snowfall and at night we did what we could with a portable small electric element and a heating mattress.
During the day, the best thing you could do was go outdoors. Chinese apartments are often simple concrete boxes that completely absorb heat and thin glass windows do not make things better.
One night the water pipes froze and burst, because the architect had pulled the pipes outside the building.
Whether there is central heating indoors or not depends on whether you live north or south of the Huai River and the Qingling Mountains. The ancient border between southern and northern China.
The decision was made in the 1950s in the spirit of the planned economy.
In the future, however, the boundary will probably be between the poor and the rich.
Residential areas that are built today can choose to install, for example, underfloor heating regardless of where in China the apartment is built.
And like so much else, the corona pandemic has also affected indoor heat.
This spring, authorities in several cities, including Beijing, extended the heat indoors to make people a little warmer and perhaps a little healthier.
And now this fall has neighboring cities to Beijing snapped at the elements prematurely for the same reason.
But here in Beijing, it is still November 15.
So, I wait patiently, embedded as I am in double fleece shirts, listening with longing for the sound of water in the pipes.
Source: ICELAND NEWS