Trepidation

The coldest period of the Beijing winter always seems to fall in the week or so either side of the lunar New Year's Day - no matter how early or late in the Western calendar year that may fall. It's somewhat uncanny.

I had been starting to wonder if that observation would be disproved this year. For the past 5 or 6 days, we seem to have been on a steadily improving trend, with the nighttime temperatures not dropping to more than 4 or 5 degrees below zero (positively "mild" round these parts, I assure you!), and the daytime high creeping a half a degree or so higher each day. Today, the temperature was above freezing by mid-morning (and thus an almost "balmy" 7 degrees Celsius above by mid-afternoon). I don't think that's happened in 5 or 6 weeks. If this continues, the ice on the lakes will be melting quite soon. (Erm, it appears to be permanently melted around Yinding Qiao, but that, I assume, has something to do with a sewage inlet. And it looks dangerously thin all around the edge of Houhai. You can't help but wonder what they're doing to maintain an adequate thickness of ice for the mass skating on Qianhai. Are they actually refrigerating it, do you suppose??)

However, there have been rumours flying around for a few days now that it's going to get seriously f***ing cold again around the middle of this week; and now Weather Underground "confirms" that on Thursday we can expect a daytime high of -8. With 10 or 12 degrees of windchill on top. Ouch! I have found Weather Underground's predictions for China more than 24 hours ahead to be wildly unreliable, but.... if this one proves to be correct, I think that will be the coldest day we've had all winter so far. In fact, it will probably be worse than the coldest night we've had all winter. And these Siberian cold snaps usually hang around for at least 3 or 4 days.

Not looking forward to it.....