Monday, October 20, 2014

Autumn is the Beginning of the Phlegm Season

The dog breath days of summer are finally gone, and Autumn is upon us.  It's the nicest time of the year here.  The oppressive humidity has vanished, leaving us with sunny days in the mid 80's, cooling to around 70 at night. (Since most of you are American, I'm keeping our archaic Fahrenheit temperatures.  You foreigners can go look it up.)  This occurred during the latter part of the National Day "holiday", the seven day long kind of holiday, beginning October 1, celebrating the anniversary of the Communist Party's rise to power.  Of course, two of those days are just days that are borrowed from weekends that have to be made up leading up to, and following the time off. Plus two of the days are also a Saturday and a Sunday, so they really only get three real holidays. But hey, it's seven days off in a row, so time for a billion people to have some fun!
Since more and more people are rising out of poverty and can afford to travel, they do so.  All the highways and railways become jam packed with people going to popular destinations, which become overcrowded masses of humanity, rendering those places nigh intolerable.  Smart people stay home.
People with more modest means wander around town looking at stuff.  If they are lucky, they may see a foreigner!  

One day, we joined a group of our friends at the big park outside of town to enjoy some beer and everyone's favorite chicken. This also enabled us to experience some "real China"--that is riding in an ancient bus, jam packed with holiday revelers, whose holiday has just been enhanced by having foreigners to gawp at.  There are two bus companies (I think) that serve the city.  One has most of the routes, and is constantly upgrading its fleet with new buses.  They are modern, well air conditioned vehicles with WiFi. The other company has two routes, and has a fleet of stumpy, rattletrap jalopies which may have seen service at the tail end of the Cultural Revolution.  They belch out enough black smoke to make one wonder if they run on coal. They have air conditioning in the sense that the air is changed to a different condition than it was previously in. The air vents exhale a vapor that has a strong essence of radiator coolant. The brakes screech and grab, causing the bus to shudder to a stop (at least it stops).  The clutch slips and the gears grind. Many of the hard plastic seats are cracked and held together with wire.  Sitting on those is to guarantee one a pinched bun cheek.  They have generous legroom is one is a double amputee, or if one remains standing.  These buses are not fast, which is not a problem on a holiday, since they spend the vast majority of time idling in traffic. They do that fairly well, with only an occasional spasmodic vibration that rattles the windows.   We eventually lurched to our destination and enjoyed an afternoon of eating, drinking and visiting.  The high point was the final massive tropical deluge of the season, which lasted much longer than usual, and resulted in the exodus of much of the crowd.


As I mentioned earlier, the weather has cooled and the air has become drier.  We can now spend most of the day with our apartment window open, which brings wonderful northern breezes in and has the added bonus of making us much more intimate with our neighbors.  Mostly it just enables us to hear a lot more.  Some things, we kind of wish we didn't have to hear.  
There are the usual morning noises, with Opera Man and Boss Communist dominating the morning sounds. But there is another, one of my favorite sounds, which comes from (mostly) men.  
One of the less appealing personal habits the Chinese have, one that annoys people in other countries who encounter Chinese tour groups, is the practice of loudly hawking and spitting anywhere they happen to get the urge.   Since smoking and eating deep fried street food are such a big part of many Chinese men's lives, and since many of my neighbors are elderly, much of their morning exercise consists of efforts to expel the byproducts of tobacco and gutter oil consumption.  It's a veritable symphony of savage coughing and expectoration. The Phlegm Concerto in D mucus.  Of course, cooler weather exacerbates this condition, and since the windows are open,  we'll be privy to all of the most intimate bronchial episodes our neighbors can provide.  Is this another example of "real China"?  No, it's snot.

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