Don't Hassle Me I'm Local

In the immortal words of Eddard Stark: winter is coming. Beijing is quite cold. And, since it's Beijing, when you breathe in the sharp crisp air, the smoggy hands of the city's pollution aren't far behind to massage your lungs with a tight grip. It's not as bad cold-wise as Bard or Ulaan Baatar were, but I can tell it's gonna get pretty chilly as we move deeper into the winter season. The strong winds don't help people out much either.

I first noticed the cold while I was coaching my boy's high school basketball team. I think that virtually every high school in Beijing holds their basketball practices on outdoor courts - and my teams are no exceptions. Playing outdoors makes sense in the spring, the summer, and even fall. But it seems silly and reckless to play outside during the winter. Nevertheless, we keep on marching into it week by week. Last week, it was especially cold and the winds were really a blowin. I had to stop in the middle of speaking several times and turn my back toward the wind because I couldn't yell over the strong gusts of dust and pollution. The day had started warm so I only had on my jeans, a sweathshirt, and a beanie. All of the high schoolers wore matching sweatshirts and sweatpants. They looked like a bunch of Umpa Lumpas. I'm more concerned for what's going to happen with the players in the severe cold - I mean, for guys who already have trouble with their hand-eye coordination, adding numb hands and stiff limbs certainly won't help. It's going to be a long season.

By the time practice was over, I couldn't feel my hands at all and I was shivering so I waddled to the subway stop and went home. I will definitely be better prepared next time. A shout out to Momma Bennett for insisting that I bring my old Goretex Northface snowboarding gloves, those are going to be handy (HA). I've got a lot of warm clothes too, so next time I'm going to make sure that I'm more insulated than a starving Eskimo floating on a piece of drift ice on the Arctic. 

Last week's practice couldn't have been more than 40 degrees, but it certainly wasn't freezing like I'm pretty sure it will be in January and February. I don't envy those kids, and that's coming from someone who had to wake up at 5:30AM every weekday during college to go to basketball practice.

Beijing is pretty polluted. Even my Chinese friends have acknowledged this. Here is an example of photographs taken looking up and down the same street, one during a polluted day, and one during a clear day. Let's see if you can tell which is which.

Yeah, it's like that.

Today Sun Qiang, Sam (the other guy who works on the curriculum development with Sun Qiang and I), and myself had a long overdo meeting. I have been working some long weeks and now that things are settled down a little more (we just hired 3 additional coaches) I have different responsibilities. 

It took a month or two of scrambling but we finally have all of our ducks in a row. I have gotten the hang of coaching and understand how the company and the Chinese parents want me to coach. I am now in charge of training the new coaches that we hire. Basically, I will be going to their camps when they begin and coach for the majority of each camp and give them only a little bit of time to run the show. As they get better they'll do more coaching and once they seem to get the hang of it, I can stop going altogether. It's a mutually beneficial arrangement. 

This means I am now only in charge of coaching teams 3 times a week (minus helping new coaches). 1 time for the HS Girls team, and 2 times for my HS Boys team. It's the best situation because I get to keep coaching, but I don't have to coach exhausting little kids.  I will also be running the demo classes we put on around the city for new prospective camps. Once some other coaches get the hang of how to coach, they'll be sharing the demo camp load with me. So that's it for coaching.

As for the office, I only need to come in 2 times a week. And each day I only need to be in the office for 3 or 4 hours. This means a TON more free time, more time to dedicate to Chinese. Or maybe I could get a second job working as a street sweeper during the night, and I could work with all of the elderly Chinese ladies. We could battle with our bamboo brooms under the moonlight, obscured by all of the smog. When we finish in the wee hours of the morning, they could take me to their dancing or tai-chi classes with all of their elderly friends and after we slowly pace around the block with our hands behind our backs and sell nick-knacks on the side of the road. I could lead a double life. I would be like Tyler Durden except not psychotic... I would start a street-cleaning club and call it the street-cleaning club. And you would not be allowed to talk about it. We would play majiang and drink tea and lure all of the passersby to stop and stare at our games. We will form a hoard, the elderly ladies and myself, masked in the night by the silence of our slipper-worn steps and the haze of that grayish brown omniscient Beijing smog. We will slip into government buildings and begin epic games of majiang in the lobbies, stopping government employees from entering the offices and completing work. We will bring China's bureaucracy to a grinding halt. We are the elderly women. We are the  

I bought a big canister of coffee the other day. I thought it was 30 RMB but it was actually 80 RMB. I was considering returning it. See, the coffee you buy here at supermarkets isn't really coffee usually, it's like this weird vicious hazelnut tasting brown liquid. However, it was A LOT of coffee, so I decided to go for it. When I got home I tried it out, and poured some into the boiling water in my fancy Victrola mug. I stirred it up, slowly raised the black liquid to my mouth, and took a sip... my god. It was like miniature army men were having a war in my colon and large intestine. I briskly walked to the bathroom and relieved myself for the next 5-10 minutes. It was glorious. In lieu of good tasting coffee, the way I measure how "good" the alternative coffee is is by seeing how soon and how powerful my next trip to the bathroom is after I have a cup. Needless to say, this coffee ranked pretty high. That was yesterday.

This morning, I got up, made myself breakfast, dropped an egg on the floor, forgot to clean it up, had my coffee, and went to work. When I was 100 meters from my building when a woman came up and tapped me on the shoulder. She asked if I spoke Chinese and I said a little bit. We ended speaking about 50/50 in basic Chinese and English. From what I gathered, she works for some media company and was trying to hire me to work in an TV advertisement, or a TV program or something. I'm not exactly sure. She gave me her card and I'm supposed to email her a headshot. The wheels are turning in my head on how to make a fabulous one. I think Westerners get asked pretty often on the street to work in TV stuff, but still it's a little flattering and could be an interesting story.