The most appropriate way to start off this blog is to discuss the new years festival here in China. Right off the bat I will admit that the New Year’s festival (Chun Jie/春节/Spring Festival) is annoying and frustrating. I knew it was first going to be a problem when, on the first day, I was trying to purchase a cell phone. The shop that sells cheap SIM cards was closed, the family had returned to their 老家(Laojia/ancestral home). This has been the case with pretty much every vendor. As the week progressed more and more stores were closing. The biggest drawback this had, has been to my well being. I was looking forward to coming to Beijing and having lots of readily available and cheap food nearby. Instead I have found myself wandering the nearby streets of Beijing in the cold in search of restaurants that are open.
Traditionally Spring festival was the most important Chinese holiday. It is where the stereotypical dragon costumes come from. Usually everything shuts down for people to return home and spend the festival with their family. Fireworks are also a rich part of the tradition. The other custom that has been a more recent development is the New Year’s Gala put on by CCTV. It was apparent that it was a huge thing. All the families were watching it. We watched it with the family with whom we shared dinner, it was playing on the bus ride home, and as we passed restaurants we could se that everybody in the restaurants was situated in front of the TV to watch it. This event would put Dick Clark and Ryan Seacrest to shame, think Chinese opening Olympics but on a scale just a tiny bit smaller.
To celebrate my first spring festival IES took us out to a temple fair. It was located on one of the parks. I think it was the summer palace. Anyways, we wandered around for four hours in 15-degree weather. Other than the food the fair really wasn’t too exciting. In all honesty it looked as if the Chinese had taken one of Minnesota’s pride and joys, the state fair, sinicised it and decided to hold it in the dead of winter. They had the arcade zone, the food alley, and various performing areas. The games were all typical games found in the US so we skipped those and went to the important the section, the food. I had two Xinjiang chuanr, some doughnut hole looking things, two Jianbings, and a scorpion for under five US dollars! For anybody wondering, the scorpion tasted like the shell of a shrimp, and it was about 2 ½ inches long. As I ate it I had three Chinese guys with video cameras come up to me to record the ordeal. I will try to post pictures later once I figure out how. I will go into more depth on the food in later posts, I just wanted to show the wide variety of foods offered.
Being photographed was a theme throughout the morning. We were at this performance where two men were supposedly wrestling, but it looked more like a combination to WWE drama, with some flips and a lot of attempts at tittie twisters. While we were watching the announcer called us out. The whole crowd turned to stare at us and laughed. We didn’t catch much of what he said, and ended up leaving after he called us out three times. At another performance people were lifting up two people using their heads. We were once again called out and the biggest guy in our group (a six-three, two-fifty something football player) stepped forward. After successfully lifting up these Chinese people he is greeted by a swarm of Chinese people asking for his picture and autograph. He became an instant celebrity at the fair. The performance I really wanted to see was the cock and ram fights, unfortunately we ran out of time.
In the afternoon I accompanied two other students living in the dorms to a friends homestay house. From his room you can see the birds nest and the Olympic pool. It was a really cool view. At the apartment we mostly just sat awkwardly talking English among ourselves, but as the day progressed and the festive drinks started flowing we all started conversing in Chinese. It quickly became apparent that I knew the most Chinese out of the four American students so served as the translator whenever something couldn’t be conveyed, and when I failed luckily I had my Ipod touch with a handy Chinese/English dictionary that saved the day. The father left early to be with his ill father, so that just left the mother and us to chat. Before dinner we helped make 100 jiazi/dumplings. I received a 不错 (not bad but much more positive) for my jiaozi making skills. Remind me to thank Jin Laoshi when I get back to Mac. Jiaozi are a very traditional Chunjie dish, but before we were even able to start cooking the jiaozi we had to make our way through ten other traditional Chun Jie dishes. One of them was a fish in tomato sauce, of which we were not supposed to finish because it is good luck to leave it for the next day. If I remember correctly the significance is that there will always be bountiful food. Probably the most notable dish was the radish (?? Some white crunchy vegetable) braised with a lot of wasabe. Drinking baijiu, beer, and red wine is supposedly the magic trifecta during Chunjie. However, since our family were not really big drinkers we only had some beer and the girls were served the red wine. This was nothing compared to the stories I heard from some of my other friends at other homestays who were served ridiculous amounts of baijiu a Chinese liquor distilled from sorghum, usually between 40 and 60% alcohol. After the first course the mother asked us what we like to do, on girl answered singing and dancing, so then we were asked to put our skills on display. The first girl sang an impressive rendition of a Chinese song. The next girl, a former gymnast, did some cartwheels until the mother started to worry that the girl might get sick from flipping so much right after eating. This whole time I was trying to buy more time. I couldn’t think of any special trick, I can’t do any dance moves, and I didn’t really know any lyrics to songs off the top of my head. The next kid stood up and did a magic trick. At this point I was so desperate I told a girl to look up the Macarena on her phone because that was the one choreographed slide that I remember my parents forcing me to perform as a child. Luckily she couldn’t find it and the mother decided we should try and eat the jiaozi. After the jiaozi we went out into the streets to light our own fireworks. They weren’t the big impressive ones, but they were still fun. My fuse broke so I had to light the firecracker and run as fast as possible. As we were headed back to the apartment we realized that no on had grabbed the keys so we were locked out and had to wait until her husband returned. We took advantage of the time to wander over to the Olympic complexes. It was amazing to see streets empty of people (a rarity in Beijing) and these big buildings lit up with various flashing lights. Exhausted from the day we returned to the dorms and then attempted to fall asleep with fireworks exploding every couple of minutes. Sorry for the length, I will definitely keep the posts shorter from here on out.
