The weather in Shenzhen, China – actually across the entire region – has been dark and dreadful as of late. It’s not winter anymore, but the March/April rainy blahs can get you down. When May arrives, like magic, there will be sunshine and blue skies (depending on the air pollution index).

For now, it’s dark, damp, and not pleasant. I am not alone: Helpful photo guru Craig Ferguson lamented on twitter about his grey days in Taiwan. The lack of light combined with “the pressures” of life has left me feeling lethargic and moody. Maybe there should be a spring hibernation? Sleep through the rain?

edit: Yesterday was so humid that when I stepped outside, I thought for a brief moment, I was in Thailand.

And… I have a “work apartment” and the couch I am currently surfing. I find myself waking up and not knowing where the hell I am. Yes, I’ve been residing in two apartments for quite a while – but the new couch arrangement has thrown me for a loop. I leave the bathroom light on to quell the panic I feel as I groggily try to realize where I am.  After I move (again) I will still face this fun. Maybe in six months life will return to normal…

Pacific typhoon season starts in June – something to look forward to. When I was teacher typhoon day cancellations were a welcome respite to the monotony, and celebrated with much jiu. I don’t think I will find the same fun in my current position.

I’m willing to take bets – I’m fairly certain that Mrs. Stevo will go into labor during a typhoon. Why? Because that’s my life. Baby Stevo will probably be born in the back of a taxi stranded on a water-logged Shenzhen  street.

On the plus side – I’ve decided that Leica would be a great name for a girl, and maybe Elinchrom for a boy.

Some stuff to read: Wandering Educators did an interview with me, take a look and read about the start of this site and my random thoughts on being an expat. It’s a great site – read it regularly. Following in the interview vein – Asian Ramblings was featured with other prominent Asian bloggers on CNN – take a look.

I have moved.

Not into the freshly renovated Chateau Stevo – that’s not ready yet. (I’m beginning to think it will never be ready). Our stuff is temporarily in storage – by stuff I mean Mrs. Stevo’s shoes and assorted non-essential photography equipment. I am camping on a friend’s sofa (he’s in Europe) and Mrs. Stevo, luckily, given her condition, is living with a friend who is a doctor.

This is only temporary (fingers crossed). The new flat needs to be painted and the ash floor refinished. On the plus side, the bathrooms are finished and lovely orange kitchen cupboards have been installed. I won’t speak of the dreadful tile job that was done by incompetent contractors. I should be documenting this on the DIY blog I set up, but there’s only so much blogging one man can do.

Moving is never easy. It’s not natural to pack your entire life into boxes. This was my third move in under 12 months – that’s about four moves too many. It’s easy for newbies teaching English in China to pick up stakes – the same cannot be said for veterans now working as corporate types. After five years you accumulate stuff. I tossed much of it, but there’s still boxes and boxes.

We couldn’t move the boxes ourselves – Mrs. Stevo can’t lift anything and I am vying for laziest man in Shenzhen title: Enter the movers. Mrs. Stevo said she had found some guys with a truck – they would arrive Saturday morning. Boxes packed, the first mover arrived 15 minutes late – which in China is early. He looked around, said he couldn’t contact his partner, and left. Fifteen minutes later his partner arrived, looked around, and left.

By 10 am we called someone else. They had two trucks and would come immediately.

The “trucks” it turns out, were motorized trikes (much like the one above). The new movers loaded our boxes onto two trikes with speedy gusto. The two piles I had made – boxes for storage and boxes for my temporary apartment – were efficiently mixed together into one homogeneous pile of plastic and cardboard. I should know better than to try to be organized.

Then the first mover returned and tried to take over. They had been looking for bigger trucks, he explained. His cell phone was broken. They now had a bigger vehicle, they would take over. If the current movers could load the boxes onto his trike…

Nay, I say. Thanks for coming out.

A security guard wandered over as we prepared for the monumental 150 meter trek to our stuff’s new home. I’ve said before you can’t swing a dead cat in China without hitting a security guard. They are everywhere, like Amway distributors.

We couldn’t move, we were told. We didn’t have a moving permit. A permit wasn’t needed to move in, but to move my possessions 150 meters, from one apartment to another, an officially stamped permit was required.

“This is my stuff,” I protested.

“Get a permit,” I was told.

At the same moment the incompetent tilers called. Mrs. Stevo waddled to the new flat and I jogged to the estate administration office, passport in hand. The clerk looked at my passport, couldn’t read it, and took the ID card of a friend and put his personal data on the all-important moving authorization permit. It didn’t matter that the rental contract was in my name – any Chinese name would apparently deal with the red tape.

The security guard added the official permit to his clipboard and we were allowed to depart. Fifteen minutes later it was over. The movers were given my almost broken desk and a somewhat broken sofa bed, a bonus above the $13 US they had been paid.

As dusk settled I sat in my old apartment and drank a six pack. Beer is a peaceful balm to the mental abrasions China can cause.

In three weeks I get to do it all again. Actually, the way things are going that could be 5 months. Ain’t that grand?

A Chinese mother feeds her toddler snacks.

China is all about the food. Restaurants meals, street snacks, and the things in between: Food is everywhere. Life stops at meal times. When the lunch buzzer sounds all work is dropped – it is time to eat.

The night before our wedding reception I sat in the hotel where the event was to be held, waiting for the decorator. Mrs. Stevo called him after he was 20 minutes late. “He eating dinner, he will be here soon,” she informed me. My protests and indignation fell on deaf ears: He was eating dinner, end of story. Meals in my Canadian neck of the woods came after work was done, not in the midst of it.

I have often wondered if Chinese surgeons take a break from operations if they have been scheduled during meal times. Don’t laugh – In China anything is possible.

You probably have a local restaurant or two, maybe even one serves your country’s localized equivalent of Chinese cuisine. There’s probably a convenience store for quick snacks. I said China is all about the food – that’s no understatement. Snacks abound. Convenience stores have a steam table full of hot nibbles, street vendors sell a scores of “on a stick” snacks, fruit merchants sell pineapples, sugar cane, orange, raisins and water chestnuts from the beds of large cargo tricycles.

I have learned to keep my attraction to street food in check. The treadmill penance required keep my mid-life waistline acceptably attractive is difficult – it’s easier not to indulge. Above, a mother feeds her toddler daughter fish balls from a local snack emporium – a very common sight.

While it has been dreadfully chilly, the afternoon sun from my “sniper’s” nest at Momo Bar has provided some wonderful light. Two days of sun? I can’t believe it. Last week it was hot – shorts-weather. This week? I’m wearing a toque and long-johns. There’s no insulation in south China homes – plain old cement walls. If it’s 40 degrees outside, it’s 40 degrees inside. Often, it’s warming outside than it is inside. I think the Chinese weather has developed bi-polar disorder and needs medication and therapy.

It was wet too weeks ago, I don’t mean rain or assorted precipitation, I mean wet.  Like every tile surface was covered in water. I don’t know the physics behind the phenomenon. My Chinese friends believe it is water in the air. My belief is that warm weather after ten days of temps just above freezing, caused condensation to form everywhere. Please, correct me if I’m wrong.

I witnessed the downside of the freakish wetness in my second apartment. I hadn’t been there for three weeks. I noticed as I prepared to sleep Monday night that the sheets smelled decidedly funky. Upon closer inspection I find lovely black mold spots on my pillows and a strange connect-the-dots pattern on a sheet. Lovely. I went home the next day, linens in hand, ready for the washing machine and Mr. Sun.

Chinese Lunar New Year is also called Spring Festival. It should be called Almost Spring Festival. I spoke with a Canadian in Shanghai earlier this week – he opined that Canada was warmer than China. That’s not enough to draw me back but is certainly food for thought.

I’m off to Hong Kong tomorrow to a Strobist shoot with some local photographers and 3 models. The public wharf in Kennedy Town, Hong Kong Island is our location. Photos of Asian models to follow.

From my usual perch at Momo Bar and spied this young lad taking a hearty sip of milk tea. If there’s one thing a growing toddler needs it’s a good hit of sugar and caffeine. Welcome to China.

Grandparents are generally the caregivers of their grandchildren. While mother and father are out making money, granny or grandpa are at home with the kids. An afternoon visit to the playground features a stunning contrast in ages: Wrinkled faces that witnessed the Cultural Revolution chat as wee ones climb, laugh and cry. There are domestics, mostly rural village girls, but they are not as prevalent as the Filipina, Malaysian and Indonesian domestics in Hong Kong.

A year from now I will be able to take this photo of Grandmother Stevo and still-percolating Baby Stevo. Mrs. Stevo’s mother will be coming to live with us. This raises some issues. Grandmother Stevo speaks neither English or Mandarin, only her village dialect that I find impossible difficult to understand. And, Chinese child-rearing is not the something I want to comment on. I’ll hypothesize: If Dr. Spock’s work has been translated it hasn’t been read. The One-child policy has led to a lot of spoiled children but not a sparing of the rod.

Mrs. Stevo returned from the hospital yesterday with a fresh ultrasound pic. I’m not being unkind when I say the 1.5 pound Baby Stevo looks like some sort of bizarre sea creature. Ultrasound images are about as flattering as photos of yours truly.

This image was shot “on the sly” with a Phottix Hero Wireless Live View Remote.

The Chinese Lantern Festival will be celebrated February 28, bringing Chinese Lunar New Year to an end. The 15-day long Spring Festival will draw to a close. No more closed businesses, and most importantly, no more fireworks. I have never lived in a war zone, but the constant deafening explosions of past two weeks have given me a fair indication of what an artillery strike would sound like. I think Expatriate Games would agree….

The Lantern Festival will see the first full moon of the new year – this year being the Chinese Year of the Tiger. Modern practices see families walking outside, children holding colorful paper lanterns, appreciating the moon. Glutinous Rice Balls called yuanxiao are the traditional festival food often eaten in soup called tangyuan.

The Lantern Festival has been celebrated for thousands of years. Why lanterns? What’s the deal? If I’ve learned anything in China it is there are many different explanations for everything.

One legend says the festival was a way to worship the Chinese god of heaven, Taiyi. Beginning with the Qin Dynasty, emperors would hold elaborate celebrations to appease the god and ward off possible droughts, famine, disease, and possibly dragon attacks. The end of Spring Festival is also the birthday of the Taoist god of good fortune, Tianguan. It was believed that Tianguan liked entertainment. Since there were no strippers in the days of yor, lanterns were a way of giving the dude what he craved, and hopefully having him grant good fortune to lantern bearers.

There are other stories. Which one is true? That’s a matter of personal choice. I’m partial to the story of the Lantern Festival starting as a way of deceiving the Jade Emperor in Heaven. Some villagers inadvertently hunted and killed the Jade Emperor’s favorite bird. That’s a big no-no – don’t mess with a god’s avian friends. He was a little angry and decreed the village would be destroyed in a storm of fire.

Mr. Jade’s daughter over heard his plan and told the villagers. A village wiseman decided to hang red lanterns, start big bonfires, and toss around fireworks to make the village look like it was on fire. When the Jade Emperor’s soldiers arrived to launch their shock and awe attack they saw the village was already ablaze. They reported back to the emperor who probably said, “Good,” and went back to doing his other Jade Emperor duties.  The villagers celebrated not being burnt to a crisp with the lanterns and fireworks each year on the anniversary of their deception. In your face, Jade Emperor.

I’ll be in Hong Kong, a mecca for Indian tailors and African drug dealers,  for this year’s Lantern Festival. I’ll see what trouble I can get into and the possible photos that result.