Season Schitzophrenia

One more silly China quirk is the winter heating system, which is strictly and universally determined (aka turned on and off) by the government. Somehow, somebody important decided that winter kicks in on November 15 and abruptly ends March 15 (even in Northern China!), leaving Tianjin homes freezing for a month before and after. (I feel bad for the folks up in Harbin!) Because the heating is centralized, you can't control the temperature at all; we often found it was too hot in the middle of January and had to open the windows to manage the situation. Ironically, now that winter is "over," we've traded in our comfortable gym shorts and tees for sweaters and ultra-thick thermals. Thanks for that hot chocolate, fam! We were too roasty to use it in the winter but it's warming us up nicely now that it sometimes gets up to 60 degrees outside in the sun, but unfortunately remains much colder indoors.

A similar attitude (ignoring actual weather patterns with an arbitrary standard) was first demonstrated to us around October 1st when all of a sudden it was "the cold season," and therefore it was coat-weather regardless of the temperature. Chinese masses criticized us daily for only giving our children two layers of clothing, since summer had technically terminated. They didn't seem to notice the sweat beads accumulated on Didi's head. (This practice still continues today; our favorites are when people scold us for under-dressing our kids as they ride by on bikes, or there's the infamous roll-down-the-car-window tactic, in which we are sometimes labeled as 'unfit parents' as the strangers drive off into the horizon... )