Insulation

Akiva and I are proud of Daddy’s first DIY project in his room. -Haga

I need to explain what I have done to our apartment.

I have heard that the wind in China comes almost exclusively from the North. The wind comes down from the Artic, freezing to hellishly low temperatures over Siberia. The wind then picks up a lot of dust and dirt over Mongolia to give it flavor. It hits Beijing with a cold, dry Winter. But when that wind comes to Shanghai / Suzhou, it warms up just a bit…and picks up water.

From my perspective, Shanghai (and Suzhou region) is the coldest place I have ever lived. (I don't remember how cold Chicago got) Sure, Beijing gets colder. But its dry. Shanghai gets cold. And damp. And dark. And miserable. Suzhou gets cold and damp, but not nearly as dark. I have a friend from Xinjiang (North-Western province), where it gets to -30 C during the Winter. He tells me he feels much colder in Shanghai.

New York actually gets colder and is probably wetter than Beijing, but Beijing, New York, and Chicago are all cities built with central heating in mind…and those cities were built by people who had enough common sense to install insulation into their homes. Apartments in South China (i.e. South of the YangZe river, which geographically speaking is middle China), do not usually have good insulation, unless you live in an expensive new place. And a lot of those new places are built with super high ceilings, so that rich people can feel that they have more space while they shiver because the warm air rises to the top of those ceilings. Only the newest apartments have dual-pane windows.

Now, about windows… In China, there are four, and only four generations of windows:
1. Wood with glass (or paper or plastic or whatever)
2. Steal with glass
3. Aluminum with glass
4. Dual-pane glass with extruded vinyl - plastic frames.

My apartment has Generation 3. And the thing about Generation 3 windows is that THEY SUCK. They do not insulate at all. Aluminum is a heat conductor, so it passes warmth to the outside. And there all sorts of open cracks for air to go through.

It used to be, back in the commie days, that you could only turn on heating after December 15th South of the YangZe (or so I heard). I imagine that as the cost of fuel oil increases, eventually someone in Beijing will mandate that everyplace gets retro-fitted with good insulation. On the other hand, Chinese people only turn on the “heaters” on the coldest of days, in order to save money.

Notice how the word “heaters” is in “Quotation Marks”. There are no heaters in the South. There are air conditioners. Basically, the Shanghai heater is the installed air-conditioner, turned on to reverse the flow of air, pumping in the hot air. These are not dedicated heaters and do not heat much, nor do they heat efficiently. And they are expensive to run.

So I decided to strategize the heating situation. I do not want our place to be too cold for Akiva. We can’t move out to a newer apartment yet, so this is where we will be during the winter. So this weekend, I taped up the seems around all the North-facing windows (I will get the South ones later, but the North ones are more important…and Akiva’s room is on the North side.) Then I taped two layers of bubble-packaging plastic over the North-facing windows. The only window I did not tape and cover was the kitchen window…you never know when you are going to burn some food and need to open that window quickly.

We also will buy some electric blankets for our bed, and an electric blanket to put down on the floor for Akiva’s play area. And we are going to purchase some electric space heaters to put in Akiva’s room and my office (I don’t think we are supposed to use electric blankets for Akiva).

In truth, I don’t know if the bubble-plastic and the tape-over-the seems will work. And there are some places that we probably can’t do anything about. . But if these changes make our space a little warmer than last winter, I will be satisfied. - Jesse

Thanksgiving Peking Duck

We are developing a little bit of our own traditions here. For the last three Thanksgiving holidays, we have been here in China. We could go and have a traditional Thanksgiving holiday meal in one of the hotels…many Americans do this. But in general, we don’t like eating Western food here. And even if it was OK, it would not be as good as my mother’s (and sister’s and Aunt Gayles) Thanksgiving cooking. And even if, by chance, I found a place that made Thanksgiving food as good as they make it, would I care? I mean, Thanksgiving food is not great food…its Turkey, which is a rather sour tasting bird, with gravy (i.e. fat), stuffing (not sure what that actually is), cranberry (mmm good), matza ball soup…uh…wrong holiday.

So we go to have Beijing Duck on Thanksgiving. And we go to a restaurant called QuanJuDe. The Quan means whole (I think), I don’t know what Ju means, and De means morality. Or something like that. When Nixon came to China in the 1970s, he ate at the original QuanJuDe restaurant in Beijing. So there is some history behind the restaurant. As I recall the story, Beijing Duck used to be made by slowly cooking a live duck, forcing it to gorge itself on sugar water. Eventually the duck died of heat exhaustion, but not until it gulped down a lot of sugar, making its meat very sweet.

I don’t think they prepare the duck like this anymore. In fact, I’m not really sure that the QuanJuDe in Suzhou (located on the corner of Gangjiang Road and Renmin Road) is part of the Beijing chain, or is a copy-right infringing rip-off of the famous Beijing restaurant. The menu is much more Suzhou-afied. A lot of shrimp and crab dishes. Less meat. No Yanjing Beer (a really good beer brewed only in Beijing). Everything was sweeter than we remembered it.

We ate half a duck. There was not a lot of meat, but there was a lot of fatty skin. We liked it a lot, but we would have liked to have more meat. You are supposed to put the meat on a small pancake thing, poor on a little “duck sauce” (I think that’s Hoisin, or HaiXian sauce), add some onions, and then eat.

We also ordered a bowl of duck-wanton soup…pretty good. Some Northern mushroom soup…very good. A cold cucumber dish…eh…not as good as in my favorite DongBei (NorthEastern ) restaurant, and some greens.

Haga and I are thankful to be together with Akiva. We are thankful that our families are in good health and thankful for the love of friends and family. Akiva is thankful for his toys, anything he can put into his mouth, and the love of his parents.

Akiva's First Sabbath in Suzhou

Very Small Things, But.....

I needed glue to put superman logos together for Halloween costumes. I bought a Chinese barand glue at Bairunfa, a local supermarket. I glued yellow, red and black pieces together. The logo looked perfect. The big logo is for Jesse. The middle size is mine and the cute small one is for Akiva. I was ready for Halloween. Next day all pieces came off. I re-glued the pieces. But they came apart again. I wondered how Chinese students do art project at school. I had to hand-sew the all pieces.

I have been trying to make our house childproofing. I put corner protectors on coffee table. Akiva has been trying to pull off them. I bought a Chinese duct tape at Carrefour, a French super market. I put the tape over the protectors to re-secure them. Next day those duck tapes came off. I thought there might be dust on the protectors. I wiped and waited to dry, again put the tape on the protectors. They came off. I was raged, “How can I live in a country the glue and tape don’t stick?”, “Why China didn’t want to pay 3COM to get their patent?” Chinese glue and duct tape are cheap, but they don’t stick. Big fu*kin’ waste!! In fact Chinese people know Chinese products are cheap and bad quality. Repair guys are on the street of every corners.

These are very little daily things, but I am still mad. I wish I can calm down and enjoy Chinese development.

[Jesse's un-invited additional opinion]: While we are at it, we could bring up the busted new sink faucet, the busted water-tank cooler, the Nokia cell phone I bought that came with pirated software, 4 backpacks that all fell apart, and several broken computer components.