The hoped-for spring doesn't quite seem to have arrived in Beijing. There's still a bit of an underlying nip in the air, the winds are often unpleasantly brisk and coming down from the north, and temperatures fall off dramatically at dusk. Even during the daytime, despite the bright sunshine, it feels to me as though the temperatures have been a good 5-10⁰ F cooler than the 60-70 we've been regularly promised by the weather websites since last Sunday (75, a couple of them said, yesterday - I don't think so). One friend reports that some magnolias flowered in her compound last weekend, but all I've seen so far are a few catkins appearing and two trees - a paltry two: one in Ritan Park on Monday, and one just outside my study window this morning - nervously just starting to open their buds... but certainly nowhere near committing to blossom yet.
I wonder if there's some adaptive mechanism by which trees "remember" the viciously cold April we had last year and have set their 'bloom threshold' higher this year.
On top of this hesitant warming and absence of budding, the sky is thick with dust. Not the apocalyptic dust storms we occasionally get - especially during the windy days of mid-March and October - just a limitless aerosol of fine, dry dirt hanging in the sky. Apart from two or three light snowfalls late in the season, there hasn't been any precipitation in Beijing since... what, October, maybe September? That's right - there's been NO RAIN in Beijing for around six months now. The place is becoming a desert. And the gritty air scours the throat.
Usually, we get a cool damp spell for a week or two in the middle of next month, with a few 'April showers'. This year, they can't come soon enough. Cough, cough....
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