Bolted breakfast, headlong rush.
Alarm clock failure.
Strange, very strange. I didn't wake up until nearly 8.30 this morning. That's at least an hour later than I've woken up.... well, any time this year, I think, certainly any time recently. And more than two and a half hours later than I've been waking most mornings for the past week or so.
My alarm clock-radio, though primed to do its ungentle business at 7.30am, remained mysteriously silent.
It was only the builders in the apartment downstairs that saved me from being late for work. Although the grinding of power drills on concrete is an even unlovelier start to the day than a blast of Beijing Radio.
2 comments:
Does China follow the "daylight time" practice of setting clocks ahead in the spring and back in the fall? The US and Canada just "fell back" this past weekend, giving us an extra (haha) hour to sleep or waste.
No, there's no adjustment of the clocks here. And the surprisingly southerly latitude (even Beijing, in the far north of the country, is further south than New York or Istanbul, only a little north of Lisbon or Washington, DC) means that, even at this end of the year, the sun is coming up before 6am.
Even more bizarrely - an example of the rampant egomania of the Chinese Communist Party drowning out any sense of practicality at times - Beijing time is supposed to be used throughout the country, even though it straddles three time zones east to west and stretches 2,000 miles, more than 30 degrees of latitude, north to south (which makes a pretty big difference to daylight times, even on the same longitude). In Xinjiang, in the far west of China, the clocks all dutifully display Beijing time, but the people adapt themselves to doing everything three hours later.
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