We escorted Nana down to her taxi yesterday afternoon as she headed for Changsha, and after a 2+ hour delay arrived in just before midnight. Zhouzhou and I left to man the fort; have just done a whack of satay and tandoori chicken breast chunks to simplify dinner logistics for the week. No students in school; but a myriad of meetings, PD and interviews for next years students; so likely to be quite a busy week. Arthur is due to get injections (non-covid related) next Monday, and so contemplating heading off to Changsha on the 12th or 13th to spend a month or so there. If I/we stay in Beijing, Zhouzhou has a particularly busy July and August lined up, which might lead me to acute Arthur saturation. Not clear whether Zhouzhou and I will be able to head back together, or if so, how long she’ll be able to spend down there before rushing back to Beijing. Some spurts of seemingly intelligible language from Arthur, including the Chinese for washing machine and little girl, though still unconvinced this is not confabulation. I’m planning on making a daily effort with the dialect down in Changsha this summer, certainly not for auditory aesthetic appeal but more out of academic curiosity.
100th anniversary celebrations this week, as I was reminded after getting on the subway only to here the announcement that the station for my change over was closed.. Thankfully managed to recompute another route that only added on 20 minutes. Lots of stations along line 1 (running parallel to the main Changan strip running west east across the centre of Beijing) closed at various times throughout the week, but now all back to normal. One of my friends from outside of school who lives in the suburbs of Beijing should be a photo and told me they were checking travellers getting onto coaches into the city for whether or not they’d been vaccinated, people who hadn’t not being allowed to board. Appears to be a lot of incentivisation being directed at low-level governance to get the vaccination percentages up. Presently no official restrictions on travel based on a preliminary Baidu (Chinese google) search, but the information and official stance is disappointedly (but not unsurprisingly) opaque. The one thing that is emphasised on officialish sites is that the vaccination is voluntary, but still seems possible/probable that domestic flights and the high-speed train may start requiring vaccination for usage. Seeing if I can get mine sorted this week despite reservations as would be unfortunate if I end up trapped in Changsha or make it to the airport only to be sent away!
