The weather in Xuzhou varies very much from season to season, winter is cold and summer is hot, not to extreme, but verging on the point of unbearable. This may sound like a good thing but is actually rather bad. What this means is that in winter it is freezing cold, but not so cold that you can't live in your house without any proper heating, if you wrap up many layers and super thick house (or outside the house) pajamas you won't be too cold, the ac turned on to 30 should do the trick. But still, your house is cold, getting out of bed is hard, showering is bone chilling, the olive oil in your kitchen freezes and is unusable, just you didn't die of cold. If you go any further north, it gets colder, and to compensate this they have central heating. Go south of Xuzhou and it doesn't get so cold, no problem there.
The same problem arises in summer, it's very hot and stuffy, but ACs aren't turned on everywhere, you quite often have to sit down to dinner and be careful not to let sweat drip in your dinner. Yet go north and it's not so hot, go south and it's so bloody hot that everywhere has AC. What makes this problem worse is the Chinese, at least in Xuzhou have a deathly fear of cold, strange then that so many places have little to or no heating during winter but that's just the Chinese. According to Chinese people there is a direct link between cold and illness, if you get ill, it IS because you were cold just now, if you are cold now, you WILL be ill. Cold doesn't just mean ‘cold’ either, it can be ‘colder’, or ‘not so hot’. If it was 35 degrees in the day and it drops down to 30 at night with a breeze god forsake you if you don't wrap up in your thick blanket and drink only but hot water. Having this mentality when raising kids means that Chinese people grow up nearly immune to heat, from small, they have been forced to, despite boiling hot humid weather, to sleep with a thick blanket, to have a hot hot shower, and wear extra layers. Chinese people can afford to do this easier than westerners for a couple of reasons. 1, Chinese people don't have BO, no smell, no matter how hot and sweaty they get there is no odour, so there's no nasty, awkwardness of being smelly and having to take a shower just to stop making people sick when you get close to them. 2, the only thing Chinese people fear more than the cold is the hell spawned vitamin d producing ultra violet rays of satan, aka sunlight, so wearing a sweater or jacket on a boiling sunny day is no problem, and hey you're not going to get too hot and smelly. But let that sunlight land on the beautiful pasty white skin and it will turn a horrible healthy brown colour, and people will see you and say "hey, look at that guy, he looks like he hasn't moved from an undeveloped country where people have to work in the fields to get food to a developed country where we live and work in cities and agricultural work gets done on a large scale by machines and then sent in to the cities for us to eat as we sit in our offices and homes avoiding the sun". And you wouldn't want people to say things like that about you because you would totally lose face. And losing face is probably more fearful than even direct sunlight or a light breeze on a spring evening in the park.
So Chinese people hate the cold, yet don't have heaters, love being warm, yet hate sunlight. Are terrified of getting a tan because it make your skin unfashionable, yet fine to wear pajamas out and about. Very paradoxical, but that is China, there are so many things here that are ridiculously self contradicting and blatantly stupid, but perfectly normal to Chinese people.
The reason I highlight this is because it's one of the most in your face cultural differences you experience being a foreigner in China. I say in your face because if it's only 20 degrees outside and you are only wearing a T-shirt there will be Chinese people ‘in your face’ warning you of how you are you are going to get ill soon, and need to wear more clothes. And this is something that, like the heat of summer, or the cold of winter, is bearable, but quite annoying.
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