Jingkids has been an essential family resource for Beijing international families since 2006. And just as kids grow up in the blink of an eye, Beijing has grown and changed almost beyond recognition in that time. In Throwback Thursday we jump in the time machine, traveling through our 15 year-strong blog archives to dig out the most entertaining, fascinating, and thought-provoking stories for your reading pleasure. Ready? Let’s go…

Beijing’s getting warm again and this Thursday we #TBT back to a scavenger hunt created last March by Shelby Gleadow. Gleadow is a trainer, teacher, smitten wife of artist Stephen Gleadow, and proud mom of two wild boys. She has lived in Beijing for 17 years working in the arts, education, and development. She is passionate about fun, practicality, gratitude, and getting the pengyou price.

The Gleadows live in the 798 area and the scavenger hunt was a perfect way to get to know the neighborhood. This hunt stays within 798 and the alleys to the South in an attempt to keep it walking friendly for even our littlest of Picassos. The hunt is great for all ages and is simple enough for pre-readers with a little help from mom and dad.

Getting to 798 Art District

Enter by car or bike through the South Gate: prepare for a 10-15 minute wait as you stop to scan two QR codes to show your health status, register, and of course take your temp. There is a parking garage to your left as you enter.

Enter by foot through the West Gate (Gate 1) on Jiuxianqiao Road where you will also have to register and get your temp checked.

KEEP READING: Throwback Thursday: No More DIY Bowlcuts!

Images:

Jingkids has been an essential family resource for Beijing international families since 2006. And just as kids grow up in the blink of an eye, Beijing has grown and changed almost beyond recognition in that time. In Throwback Thursday we jump in the time machine, traveling through our 15 year-strong blog archives to dig out the most entertaining, fascinating, and thought-provoking stories for your reading pleasure. Ready? Let’s go…

I don’t know about you guys, but the warm weather these past few days has really lifted my mood! The leaves are turning green and we’ll soon be packing away our winter coats. And since the city’s getting sunny and bright again, it’s time for a refresher course on going green in all aspects of life with an easy indoor composting kit.

Kids are learning from home and this composting kit makes for a fun learning experiment for the whole family. Jingkids writer Anna Pellegrin Hartley shares the step-by-step setup of her OwnMade Indoor Composting system and tips from Daniel Lim – creator of the OwnMade Indoor Composting system.

Setting it up

The OwnMade consists of a felt bag, measuring 30cm x 30cm (about the size of an IKEA box), a fine mesh cover, a bag of dry starter mix, and a metal trowel.

As per Lim’s instructions, I pour the dry mix into the felt bag and mix it through with a 2-liter batch of sugar water. Lim recommends using either brown sugar or molasses (which are high in minerals) for the water mix, but I only have honey around, and he says that will do.

In anticipation of the workshop, I’d been saving my kitchen scraps for about a week. I throw them in my trusty Kitchen Aid blender and blitzed them to a manageable size. This included banana peels, an old carrot, garlic, coffee grounds, some plant cuttings, and a couple of eggshells. According to Lim, as the average human diet is quite varied, food waste compost is uniquely rich in nutrients and nitrogen and produces some of the best compost around. Farmers love it, and I’m hoping that my houseplants will too.

While it is possible to add large pieces of food, Lim doesn’t recommend it as it will dramatically slow-down the composting time, and is also likely to throw the microbe balance of this pocket-sized system out of whack.

I tip the blended compost into the bag with the now-activated starter, and mix it all thoroughly, then cover the bag securely with the nylon mesh to prevent flies and bugs from getting in. If flies do get in and birth maggots, I’ll most likely have to throw out the compost and start again from scratch.

According to Lim, compost systems only smell bad when they become deprived of oxygen, triggering an anaerobic chemical reaction that creates stinky gasses. Therefore, the compost should be mixed through every day, to allow fresh oxygen to reach every part of the mixture. The bag is made of felt, which helps by allowing water to wick up the sides thereby stopping puddles of water collecting at the bottom.

The next day when I add more kitchen scraps I notice that the mixture is already warm to the touch, a sure-fire sign that decomposition has begun.

Two weeks later

Two weeks down the line, I’ve gotten into my rhythm, saving my kitchen scraps in a container, then blitzing them and adding to the mix in the evening. Some days, my husband and I are barely at home and don’t cook at all, and I forget or am too lazy to mix the compost. There have been some odd smells, but nothing too offensive (just vaguely ‘composty’) and they seem directly linked to how wet the compost is. Lim’s also added me to an active local WeChat group where other people using the system troubleshoot and compare notes. I’m heartened to see that I’m not the only one falling under the spell of this system.

Two months later

After two months of almost daily use, and two separate week-long periods in which I am away from Beijing and the compost has to fend for itself, this system couldn’t be going better.

I actually look forward to tending to my strange little pet each day, and marvel at the great disappearing act: within 24 hours, handfuls of regular food scraps have simply vanished! The only evidence of use is that the compost bag is slowly but surely filling up. When it eventually does, I’ll need to take about half out, and let it cure before using. I have a couple of houseplants that will benefit from some compost, and I’ll scatter the rest on the garden of my building compound. The system is super easy to use and manage, creates zero stank, and takes up very little space in my apartment. All in all, I’m totally sold.

Why compost? 

But aside from being a fun and interesting exercise, and assuaging my eco-guilt a little, really what’s the point of composting on such a small scale?

For Lim, the OwnMade is just a tiny part of a much grander vision: fixing our faulty nutrient cycle in which food is grown on farms, shipped far away, and the nutrient-rich scraps end up wasted in landfills. Municipal-scale composting systems have consistently failed the world over because people don’t properly understand how they work, and accidentally contaminate systems. By introducing people to composting via the OwnMade system, and by collaborating with a growing number of Beijing schools, Lim hopes to gradually revolutionize the entire country’s attitude to food, and eventually, our waste management systems.

That smells good to me.

OwnMade Indoor Composting Kit costs RMB 320 including delivery. Order a kit via Weidian here (beta), or Yoopay here, and follow Lim (WeChat ID: dadan8) for updates on future workshops and events.

KEEP READING: Get Clean, Go Dirty – The Raw Truth About Composting

This post originally appeared on our sister site the beijinger.

Images: Anna Pellegrin Hartley, courtesy of OwnMade, Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Beijingkids has been an essential family resource for Beijing international families since 2006. And just as kids grow up in the blink of an eye, Beijing has grown and changed almost beyond recognition in that time. In Throwback Thursday we jump in the time machine, traveling through our 14 year-strong blog archives to dig out the most entertaining, fascinating, and thought-provoking stories for your reading pleasure. Ready? Let’s go…

This week, we travel back in time to January 2013 when Beijing reportedly finally decided to ‘do something about the smog’. While smog in the capital was by no means a new phenomenon (there is evidence that Beijing’s air has been atrocious since as early as the Yuan Dynasty), the term ‘airpocalypse’ first came into common usage in 2013 when measurement technology and a growing awareness of the negative health impacts of air pollution reached critical mass in the West and resulted in an explosion of interest in the topic. On Jan 12 of that year, AQI readings reportedly jumped as high as 993 in certain neighborhoods.

Can you identify the famous Beijing landmark in this image?

At the time, the New York Times, reported that “Beijing’s government implemented emergency pollution measures … in order to wage battle against the stubborn smog.” The plan included a temporary shutdown of over 100 factories and one-third of all government vehicles being taken off the streets. Yet even this was all only likely to add up to a 2 percent reduction in air pollutant density.

These days, Beijing is enjoying its cleanest air ever, and is now not even among the world’s top 200 most populated cities. According to Yann Boquillod, CEO of AirVisual, a company that monitors Beijing air quality there are even more interesting data to come, as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to unfold around the world. “We analyzed several cities in the world to understand their level of pollution during the lockdowns, and most cities showed that the reduced human activities resulted in significantly reduced air pollution”.  According to their report, Wuhan experienced a 44 percent decrease in PM2.5 microparticles in January and February of this year, which were their cleanest months on record.

For years, Beijing was a haven for pyromaniacs during Chinese New Year celebrations

While air pollution discussions usually focus on the emissions produced in factories and by vehicles, the 2013 beijingkids article also touched on another very topical debate: whether fireworks should be banned during Chinese New Year, “as they emit toxic elements like aluminum, copper compounds, mercury, lead dioxide, and more.” Fast-forward to 2020 and it’s nigh impossible to even purchase fireworks within the 5th ring road, let alone set them off, and for many Beijingers who moved here in recent years, the idea of dodging street firecracker parties and breathing thick clouds of the acrid smoke while walking between hutong bars seems the stuff of legend. How quickly things change.

You can read the original article in its entirety here.

KEEP READING: Parents Raise Concerns Over Prolonged N95 Use

Images: Geografiavisual, Hayden Opie via Flickr, the Beijinger

Beijingkids has been an essential family resource for Beijing international families since 2006. And just as kids grow up in the blink of an eye, Beijing has grown and changed almost beyond recognition in that time. In Throwback Thursday we jump in the time machine, traveling through our 14-strong blog archives to dig out the most entertaining, fascinating, and thought-provoking stories for your reading pleasure. Ready? Let’s go…

This week, we travel back to May of 2007, when Julia Donaldson, the best-selling author of dozens of children’s books including the classic The Gruffalo came to Beijing. Even back then, Donaldson was already a hot property, as her book had already sold over 1M copies and been translated into dozens of languages. Yet even further success lay before her: now in 2020 the book has sold over 13M worldwide copies, she has been awarded an Order of the British Empire, and a special commemorative Gruffalo 50p coin was even minted in the UK in 2019. Back in 2007, she did a special reading at The Bookworm and our writer Simon Fowler managed to catch her afterward for an interview.

Fowler and Donaldson discussed how the Gruffalo was originally inspired by a classic Chinese folk tale (狐假虎威hújiǎhǔwēim lit. fox fake tiger power), the merits of reading her rhyming-couplet storybook aloud, and the amazing success of her book. Since then, she’s gone one to write dozens and dozens of other books, including many collaborations with The Gruffalo illustrator Axel Sheffler, including a direct sequel, The Gruffalo’s Child. 

Since that time, a few key things have changed: the beloved Bookworm bookstore in Sanlitun is no more, and this very magazine was at that time going by the name ‘tbjkids‘, as an off-shoot of the already popular the Beijinger magazine. Yet as a proud aunty to seven adorable little humans, I can testify that the allure of this classic story has not faded: it’s the book I am always happy to read when I get to visit with my nieces and nephews, and they never seem to get sick of it either. If you haven’t yet discovered the joys of this classic tale, we can’t recommend it enough. In the meantime, click this link to read the full original article and interview. 

KEEP READING: Where to Get Your Book Fix in Beijing

Images: Amazon.co.uk

Remember VoIP? How about international landline calling cards? Telegrams? Carrier pigeons? How about smoke signals?

Ok, I jest with those last ones, but before FaceTime, WeChat calls, WhatsApp, and Zoom, those were our best options when it came to communicating over long distances. While our recent forced transition to a totally online world thanks to COVID-19 has not been totally smooth, it’s easy to forget just how hard it was to have a simple chat with the family back home in the past.

Ready to jump in the time machine? Ten years ago this month, we were blogging about how to call home without breaking the bank. Back then, “Typical landline rates to the USA/UK on Beijing Telecom are RMB 8 per minute. From the USA to China, rates average USD 0.15 a minute.”

“It says here we should get milk on the way home”

Skype, which is widely regarded as the first large company to commercialize Voice-over-Internet-Procol technology, did exist and by 2010 had over 660 million worldwide users, but here in China at least, we were still dealing with the inconvenient “echo effect” which made using the service a pain. And iPhone FaceTime was still in the future: it wouldn’t be released in the US until a month after the article was published, in June of 2010.

So what was a keen conversationalist to do? Our writer recommended a couple of other VoIP options, explaining the system “which uses the internet and assigns you a USA based telephone number.” VoIP had only taken off in a big way in around 2007 in most parts of Asia and was still a bit of an unknown entity to most casual users. In the blog, we discussed the merits of two different services, Vonage and Ooma which “both have land-line quality connection” (if you remember what that is). So far so good, but stacking at USD 25.99 per month subscription for the first, and a flat USD 249.99 fee for the second, these were pretty expensive investments back then. Oh, and the systems also were required to be purchased and shipped from the US, needed a replacement 220v charger, and didn’t work over WiFi.

The technology may have come a long way, but one thing still rings true: privacy concerns are real. While discussing different VoIP options, we also threw in a warning about one service which actually still exists, called MagicJack. Although relatively cheap back then (one-time fee of USD 39.99) it required users to allow the company to “analyze their calls” and then peppered users with targetted ads. Some things never change: if you’re not paying, you’re the product.

You can read the entire original blog here.

KEEP READING: Maintaining Long-Distance Friendships From China: Some Practical Tips

Images: Wikimedia Commons