Teething Problems

I have been attacked by China. Picked up, flung around, given a good few firm slaps and thrown to the ground disorientated and with a banging headache. Overdramatic? Possibly, but that is exactly how it feels.

As mentioned before I have been to China numerous times; whether to study, on holiday or once previously to work. I kind of feel like I have some kind of understanding of how the country works. I feel like I can handle it and, despite the numerous changes since my first visit in 1999, I feel I can deal with the country. Well the last weekend proved my wrong.

I arrived back in Beijing two weeks ago, landing in what the pilot rather optimistically called ‘a light mist’ but which looked to me a lot like a think, industrial smog – tinged yellow and hovering over everything like treacle. That aside, it felt good to be back, to breathe in China (which incidentally smells like garlic and exhaust with just a pinch of MSG) and I set about seeing friends, sweating away on city buses, drinking the local beer, preparing for work and then a week in my new office on the seventh floor of the China Life Tower in the city centre. It all felt pretty good. But then on Saturday afternoon it hit me. I don’t know whether it was the heat, the jet lag that I hadn’t really given myself the opportunity to get over or my body just wanting a break from too much beer, too little water and a million and one MSG laden dishes, but I just gave up. I felt irritable, hot, prickly and headachy. What’s more the enormity of the fact that I do now, to all intents and purposes, live here in China and am not just visiting, not just passing through, got the better of me and it seemed the only way to get through it was by retiring to bed, a/c on full blast and sleeping for 15 hours! I can’t even remember the last time I slept that long uninterrupted? The womb perhaps? Anyway, it did me the world of good and now I feel just about ready to get out and explore, experience and taste all that this city has to offer….but at half my normal pace perhaps? It is still very hot and not likely to cool for a while...