comparing springs

26 Oct, 2026

"This weather reminds me of spring in Beijing" The Wife said as we were on the way to the supermarket this windy¹ spring public holiday afternoon.

"Except that it's not as dry here as Beijing, and we don't get sandstorms" I said.

There's no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing. I've heard that's a Finnish proverb. So far as I am aware, Finland has never experienced a sandstorm or a cyclone, nor does it experience the kind of heat or humidity that is common in many parts of the world. But the point stands - it's not bad weather, it's poor preparation.

Yes, but.

When I lived in Taiyuan, sandstorms seemed to just appear. And they appeared often. I quickly learned that no matter how hot the weather may be, I needed to shut the windows in my apartment every time I went out, even if I was just popping up to the office upstairs. There's only so many times a sandstorm appears, and you run downstairs, open your apartment door, and see nothing but solid yellow before you just shut the damn windows. I honestly couldn't even see across my very small apartment for the amount of dust the wind had filled it with.

That first spring in Beijing I was in class. It was getting close to the end of the lesson, and I glanced out the window and said, "Bloody hell!". The sky had turned an apocalyptic shade of red. I asked the students if they had another lesson after mine. They did. In another building, or this one? Another building across campus. "Well, go there now before the weather gets any worse", I told them. I then ran back to my apartment. On the way I bumped into a colleague from the USA². It was her first spring in northern China. "What's going on?" she asked. "Sandstorm," I said, "you might want to go home, swap your contacts for glasses, and make sure your windows are closed". She went and closed her windows, but from memory she left her contacts in. Alright, they're your eyes.

But Taiyuan was the worst for sandstorms, at least that one spring I lived there compared with the many springs I lived in Beijing. The sandstorms seemed to happen every two or three days, and they seemed to arrive without warning. So many times I was on my way somewhere and BAM! sand with coal dust and other finely-grained nasties mixed in was flying at high velocity all around me, tearing at my skin and eyes, and when I arrived at my destination, my first stop was the bathroom where I would rinse the sand and coal dust from my face and rinse my mouth before even thinking about what I was actually there to do.

The weather forecasts broadcast after the news on CCTV 1 every evening were good enough - and even in my early years in China when my language skills were not up to understanding much of the forecast, the symbols and numbers were clear enough for me to have an idea of what was going on. But those were forecasts for the whole of a very large country, so didn't offer a whole lot of local detail. My language skills were not up to finding that level of local detail when I lived in Taiyuan.

Ah, well, I survived alright, and I wouldn't mind moving back to Taiyuan. I'd much rather have to deal with sandstorms than the long, hot, intensely humid summers of the Yangtze Basin. And I do now have a much better command of the Chinese language, and that makes a lot more information available to me. But I still have an abject fear of sandstorms.

Down here in Aotearoa, though, spring means hayfever and worse asthma. Well, hayfever season seems to be slowly growing so that it now covers basically the whole year, and spring has moved from being hayfever season to supercharged hayfever season. Now even The Wife is complaining about hayfever in the spring here. So yes, northern China features sandstorms in the spring, but the drier climate does mean there's a lot less pollen for the lungs and sinuses to contend with.