China 2011: Day 36-38

We have entered the final phase of the project. It's hopefully where the pieces start to fall into place, in "hopefully" a good way. We really can't afford too many bumps in the road at this stage but we know better by now. There are always bumps in the road.

This past Friday night I was in bed by 8:45pm. I was so exhausted that I just could not stay awake any longer, however then I was up at 4:45am to start the next day. It was delivery day for the furniture. Now I say 'day' because that is when furniture would usually be delivered, but not in China. I was told that the furniture would come after 10:30pm because the trucks can't enter Beijing until 10pm due to traffic restrictions. Now that wouldn't normally be a really big deal but I was up at 4:45 and after another full day I was pretty much ready for bed early again. So in order to stay awake Bob and I decided to paint the last apartment on our list. We painted until 10:30 when the truck arrived. The furniture looked good, but there are a few problems. Now remember, having furniture built from scratch in a little factory out in the country with fabric that's made in China, that was then shipped to the USA so that we could pay a small fortune to have it shipped back, is a little risky in my opinion. Anyway, it looked good, but Chinese people like their furniture built low to the ground, for hobbits or little people like me and the big Americans don't fit in it so well with their knees up to their chins. Ok, I'm exaggerating a little but they all were built about 7cm too short. The good news is the legs are going to be replaced and hopefully it will all look ok, or should I say spectacular!

Bob had some fun with Michael the gardener when they went to a store to buy wood. He was wondering how they would get it home and soon found out. Pretty much everything that is too big to fit into a taxi is delivered by a delivery cart. It's basically a motorcycle with a platform on the back. Bob said it was pretty scary sitting in the back of the delivery cart on the busy streets with all the traffic zipping by.

The pollution in Beijing has been really bad the last couple of days. It was so bad yesterday that we could hardly see the buildings a block away. We both felt it with burning eyes and heavy chests. We deliberately didn't go out running because it looked so bad. We decided to look it up on the internet to see what the level was. Here's the rating chart: 0-50 Good
51-100 Moderate
101-150 Unhealthy for sensitive groups
151-200 Unhealthy
201-300 Very unhealthy
301-400 Hazardous
400-500 Beyond index
At 10:00pm on Sunday it was 562! Fortunately today was better but we didn't go outside at all. We spent the day installing curtain rods and hanging curtains. It's starting to look good.

One last tidbit: Chinese weddings usually happen in the mornings on Saturday or Sunday but sometimes during the week. We always know when a wedding is happening because they end the ceremony with fireworks and we can hear them going off in the neighborhood. One morning we were woken up at 7am with fireworks pretty close by. I guess it was a really early wedding. Numbers are important to the Chinese so dates like 9/10/11 and 10/11/11 were quite noisy with fireworks all morning long.