A nice Fall in Beijing

Beijing is a more comfortable city this time around. It's still not America, but it feels like a second tier European city. Our apartment is small but mostly clean. We have a western style toilet and hot running water (in the bathroom but not the kitchen.) There is a small clothes washer in its own little windowed closet off of the kitchen nook and a system for hanging clothes in the sealed-off sun-room. The windows and doors actually seal out the cold weather and most of the dust.

[Here is a picture looking west on a minimally smoggy day. You can actually see the mountains.]

They did finally turn on our high-rise apartment's heat on Sunday. The whole complex gets it at once. In the meantime, we bought an electric heater to keep us from freezing (mostly) at night. So of course we used up our electricity allotment and everything went out the other morning. By mid-day we had figured out that in China, one must prepay for electricity and the building manager went out and bought an electricity card for us. Hopefully we won't run short again before we leave.

The weather has actually been nice for November. Mostly in the 50's during the day. This past weekend we went to the Great Wall at Mutianyu. I brought extra gloves, scarves and hats to deal with the possibility of wind and cold on the mountain ridges. Instead, it felt like 60 degrees and calm. We had a beautiful outing and the kids had fun running up and down the wall. The children have chosen pictures from that day for their blogs. Here are some others they didn't use: