Sickness & Pollution

After being sick last week, I now have a manly voice which is on its way to being no voice. When I was sick, coworkers didn’t really notice because the worst of it was on my weekend – thank god – but now they are noticing. We have a cleaning staff that consist of several women and 2 men all in their 50s or 60s. In Chinese, we call them aunt and uncle. Since I sound so awful, they are all giving me advice on how to get better. The last three days I have been constantly scolded “Drink more warm water!” “Wear more clothing! You look cold!” “Have you taken medicine? You really need to go see the doctor!” It’s nice that they are concerned. One of them even gave me medicine, but the reality is that I feel fine, just sound bad.

Even if I wasn’t sick, they still would tell me to wear more clothing and drink more warm water. The common greeting here isn’t “How are you?” It’s “Have you eaten yet?” That does not mean it is an invite to have food with them. That’s just their way of showing concern towards their friends to make sure they are fed. They don’t actually care what you ate, just that you did. This is something I’ve been struggling with but after thinking about it, how many times a day do you get asked “How are you?” or “What’s up?” and the person could care less what your response was.

Another weird thing going on is the APEC meeting. China has made some changes to the normal routine that I’ve noticed. The first thing was our work schedule has changed. I always work weekends but now we have two “weekends” right next to each other. This means Saturday & Sunday are a normal weekend schedule but now Monday & Tuesday are also weekend schedules. Don’t ask me why because I have no idea. So our classes got all changed around and half of them are cancelled because their parents said they won’t be coming to class.

The second thing was advertisements. There was a TV ad that I saw about cleaning up the country, driving less and anything else you can think of to make China look better. To me, this is something that should be played every day to make the world “greener,” but here it’s just for the time that there is big meeting.

Another change goes off of making the country cleaner and having less cars on the road. There are rules as to which cars can drive at which times because there are just too many cars here. They go off of license plates and make the rules like if your license plate number ends in 9 then you can drive on Mondays. If you drive on other days then you will be fined. I don't know the exact rules, but you can get the idea. Well because of this meeting, they want less cars so the rules are stricter which then affects delivery trucks. We are expecting things at our office, but they are delayed because they can’t get here due to these rules!

Finally, the days leading up to this meeting were pretty polluted. I never knew why, but after reading articles online today, I found out why. They run factories harder before holidays or important meetings like this so that way they can stop production for the days they want the skies to be clear. I cannot imagine how many factories there are to make this much of a difference, but hey it worked because the past 3 days have been so clear! All for an APEC meeting…