"Summer... turns me upside down."

Free cookies (nice salty ones with chives in them -- I'm in China, remember!) to anybody who can figure out where the title comes from.

So summer is officially approaching. Technically I'm still in spring here, but I find it difficult to refer to 33°C@80%+ as "spring". Still, this is approaching the end of my sixth year in China, so I'm getting used to the heat. I'm not even using the air conditioner yet. I've partially adapted, it seems.

Maybe the massive weight loss has something to do with it?

Anyway, with summer comes all sorts of other fun things besides heat and humidity. As usual these things come in two forms: the good and the bad. Maybe that should be "the good, the bad and the ugly". Only I'm in China. Let's modify this to "the good, the bad and the positively weird".

Let's look first at the good:

• As the temperatures rise, the clothing gets skimpier and skimpier. Yes, I'm married, but this doesn't mean I'm dead! Watching the cute local girls wander around in clothing that would make a By Ward Market streetwalker gasp in shame (without the cynical, self-consciousness you'd find in said streetwalkers) is a good way to take my mind off of the searing heat.
• The city explodes with greenery and flowers. A city that in the winter is the epitome of dingy industrial cities, grey and lifeless, suddenly sprouts green everywhere. The underlying acrid scent of pollution that permeates everything is masked very effectively by a bewildering variety of sweetly-scented flowers. They're even nice on the eyes—almost, but not quite, matching the scantily-clad girls.
• A lot of my favourite foods here are summertime foods: especially the cold noodle(-like) dishes. These are coming to the table more and more often.

OK. That's pretty much it for the good. Now let's talk about the bad:

• There is, of course, the searing heat. Today it was "only" 33°C. It's been warmer already—today was actually a bit of a relief—and it's going to get worse and worse. I've seen as high as 42°C with humidity well in excess of 70%.
• The growth of all this greenery includes some plants (which I have yet to identify) which drive my nose nuts. This starts in early spring, goes away for a while, restarts around this time of year, disappears in early summer, then comes back at the tail end of summer. Every year for the past six I've lived through this and I hate it. I was allergic to nothing in Canada. It was a bit of a shock to find out how the allergy-plagued people live, let me tell you!
• One word: mosquitoes. This place is a positive paradise for those little blood-sucking vermin. They invade everything. They'll even fly to the 20th story of skyscrapers and plague people. They're merciless and they're beyond counting. If you spend an evening killing them and managed to destroy 20, you can rest assured that there's dozens more hiding where you can't find them ready to come out at you when you're no longer looking for them.

Now it's time for the positively weird:

• First on the weird list is the sheets I sleep on. If you click on the image to the right you'll notice something odd on the side of the bed farthest from the camera. It looks like the bed is covered with little pieces of wood, right? Well, it's not wood. It's bamboo. And it's hundreds of little pieces (slightly smaller in area than a Mah-jong tile) threaded together with fishing line and edged with stretchy rubber stuff. It keeps you cool in the heat. It sounds ridiculous and uncomfortable, but it is neither. It really works and it is actually quite comfortable. (The more hirsute among us have to wear light underclothes to bed, however, to avoid some truly painful moments.)
• The second weird thing is probably leaping out at you in that picture while I babbled on about the sheets. Notice that funny dome over the bed? It's a tent. There is a tent over my bed. It is mesh on all sides, including the bottom. It zips up tight allowing nothing to get in. Since Joan is pregnant now she doesn't want us to light mosquito coils at night (what we used to do to keep mosquitoes from eating us alive). So instead we bought a tent to put on the bed. I was a bit sceptical at first, but it does work well. I even (mostly) fit!
• The final weird thing is the bedding again. Ignore the covered half of the bed. For Joan the weather is still too cool for the bamboo sheets, you see, so we've folded a quilt for her side of the bed. Back over on the bamboo side, look at the odd pillow. It's made of woven grass on the side you can see. The other side is thin strips of bamboo. The filling is buckwheat husks. (It was once scented with chrysanthemum blooms, but those have long since faded away.) This is the pillow you use to keep your head cool at night. The side I have up now is suited to moderate heat. The other side is stiffer (and takes a lot of getting used to!) but is very suitable for the blazing heat later in the summer. Of course by that time I'll be firing up the air conditioner, so that side of the pillow will rarely see action. But it's there for the inevitable days where the power company decides to just shut down the electricity without warning. (Let's hope they at least pick a windy day for that!)

So, that was my little taste of China for this post. Hope you enjoyed it.