Hello readers, it’s a rather festive, de-mob happy James here penning the final blog post of the year whilst humming along to “Do they know it’s Christmas?”.  If ‘they’ in question are the Chinese then the answer is oh yes, they know it’s Christmas.  Sure, in a straw poll you’d undoubtedly discover that not many people here have heard of comrade J. Christ, but nonetheless over the last week Beijing’s gone potty for crimbo.

They’re not alone – our festive countdown has also well and truly begun: today is our 309th day away from home and it’s also our last day here in Beijing.  In 4 hours we’ll be on a plane bound for Blighty.  We’re coming home three days early thanks to the ungrateful sods who dish out drinks and peanuts for BA.  Striking for 12 days?  Really?  Has the UK gone French whilst we’ve been away?  This last minute change in plan has forced me to brave Beijing’s minus 5 chill to finish collecting tat to offer to loved ones as gifts (chairman Mao fridge magnet anyone?).  The shopping malls are decked out with trees and fake snow, the shop assistants are dressed up as Santa and the Chinese interpretations of Christmas hits blast relentlessly from tannoys all over the city.  There’s even a life-sized wobbling Santa model which has be causing much amusement – guys stand next to old saint Nick and put on their steeliest poker faces whilst their wives take a snap for the family album.  Then there’s the kangaroos wearing Santa hats…

We’re ready to depart: we’ve packed our rucksacks, our apartment’s been stuffed into boxes and Jeannie’s just landed an awesome new job for January.  We’ve even got a plan for 2010 – we’ve coming back to Beijing, we’re going to spend more time exploring China then take a two month break to travel some more before finally returning to the UK in September.  So we’ve not quite finished this traveling malarkey yet.

We need to shoot, we’ve got a plane to catch.  Before we do, I thought I’d share an interesting stat from the blog with you. I bet you can’t guess what the most popular search term people have typed into Google to find our blog. It’s actually quite ironic given what we’ve been up to over the last year.  Got it yet?  No? Here it is:

“alcohol ruins life”

Try Googling it, you’ll find us.

Merry Christmas.

Despite the lack of carols, trees and fairy light in Beijing, James and I have spent the last fortnight preparing for Christmas. Kind of. As you might be aware I’m not usually the most festive elf on the block, but this year I’m really looking forward to it, partly because we’re popping home to see everybody and partly because I’ve not been bombarded with Christmas paraphernalia in every shop, office block and on every street corner for the past three months, so when James downloaded a CD of carols and last weekend it was actually exciting to crack open the mulled Tsing Tao and start the countdown.

Last weekend we went on a Christmas shopping mission to Panjiayuan, Beijing’s most ecletic antiques market, which houses a truly amazing array of tat ranging from the very expensive and interesting to the truly shit. Here’s a small selection of what you can find: first editions of Mao’s Little Red Book, teapots, old propaganda posters, fake Ming pottery with suspiciously neat chips and cracks, fireworks, silk prints, dragon puppets, cookery books with titles like ‘100 Ways with Dog’, Brownie cameras, gramaphones, more teapots, calligraphy sets, Chairman Mao waving arm alarm clocks, wthnic minority fancy dress outfits, Jinseng, jade jewelry and a plethora of other stuff recovered from heaven knows where – I wish I knew something about antiques. James was supposed to be doing his Christmas shopping but I somehow ended up buying four large sackfuls of crap which will undoubtedly end up on YOUR mantelpieces after Christmas, so watch out if I run at you with a teapot-shaped present, it cost 30p and will look hideous in any location except on a shelf along with 3,200 similar teapots, where it looked antiquey and cool.

James, myself and the teapots will all fly home in 10 days so I’m well and truly on the final countdown at school: I spent this morning having flashbacks to my childhood as I taught my classes how to turn a piece of white paper into an over-sized snowflake…strangely enough it’s still a highly satisfying activity…you never know quite how it’s going to look until you open the folds of the paper and find all those nice, symmetrical curves and edges. I’m also teaching them ‘Santa Claus is Coming to Town’ but, in the interests of having an easy last two weeks in the classroom, I’ve elaborated somewhat on the ramifications of not being good – in my version Santa will still come, but he’ll attack you in your sleep. ‘Not being good’ is defined by talking in English class.

This weekend’s activities include dinner with the rugby girls followed by a pie and ale night on Saturday. The pies are cooked by an Australian chef who used to be the personal chef of thge Dutch royal family so I’ve been on a starvation diet for three days. Mmmm, pies.

Right, off to class, see you in a week or two, and start clearing that mantelpiece (I’m taslking to you Grandma, time to relegate the teletubby sculpture to the loft)…

Whilst Ebeneezer Ivanov has been bah-humbugging in Beijing, Matt and I have had a cracking time in Xi’an, home to China’s infamous army – the Terracotta Warriors. We shot down on Monday morning and spent three snowy nights in a cosy hostel in a traditional Chinese townhouse. Even though we are well and truly out of the tourist season and despite the freezing temperatures the hostel was busy with the familiar atmosphere of travellers coming and going. It was great to return the lifestyle we’ve grown to love over the last year. Read the rest of this entry »

I’d like to add a bad tempered caveat to James’ previous post – snow is crap. Cold and crap. Unless you’re ski-ing, when it serves a purpose, but there are no hills in a fifty mile radius of here.

Sorry, but as the festive season approaches my mood generally plummets anyway (the plummeting is exponential to the number of time I hear Noddy Holder’s moronic screeching in one day), and since I am stuck in the freezing wastes of Beijing while James and Matt are cavorting with Pandas and pretty backpackers in Xi’an, I’m in a particularly Ebeneezer-like mood. The snow appeared in earnest last Tuesday, when we woke up to find a good five inches had fallen, and since then it has been absolutely Baltic, so much so that there are still frozen piles it littering the road (a week after it fell). I walked to work this morning wearing almost everything I own, looking like the Michelin Man but feeling less hypothermic than the rest of the week, and when I got there, as usual, all the windows were open despite the radiators being on. Why? Why?  Is it a test of character? Are we supposed to be acclimatising? I think it might be the latter, because every time I mention the cold to a ‘veteran’ expat (somebody who’s been here for more than 12 months) they chuckle happily and say ‘it’s only November now, wait ’til winter really sets in’ as though they are Punxutawney Phil, or Nostrudamus, and can predict future climate. I do admit, though, that the snow made everything look very, very pretty, and it gave me loads of material in class since we’ve doing weather at the moment.

Anyway, apart from the cold (and my annoyance about missing the jolly to Xi’an), Beijing is treating us both well and time is racing by towards our flight home for Christmas (five weeks from today), which is odd since we’re so much into the routine of our temporary existence here. My students and I have got used to each other and I actually find myself enjoying most of the lessons, rugby is a nice combination of exercise and weekend alcohol excesses, we’re both able to hold a decent conversation in Chinese, and we can now look forward to food shopping without fear of accidentally buying a packet of chicken’s ovaries or pig’s pituitary glands, or something. Negotiations have opened regarding what to do/where to go/how to earn a lot of money in a very short time without breaking the law after Christmas; we’ve pretty much agreed that we want to head back to Beijing, but every so often something will happen to make us want to run away screaming and never return. Today, that something was queuing in the bank for over an hour then them closing for lunch before I got served, but then I bought roast chestnuts on the way home and met my friends for dumplings, and once my fingers had thawed out I decided I was making a fuss about nothing. I am English, and queuing is what we do better than anyone else in the world.

Ho ho ho, merry christmas!  Ok, it’s a little premature but I’m feeling rather festive here in ‘jingers thanks to the recent snowfall that’s coated the normally grey city with a couple of inches of white icing.  Our friend Matt (Skeath, from Vodafone) has come out to sample the wonders of China (he didn’t believe you’re allowed to shit in the streets and had to witness it for himself) so I’ve taken a few days out to see Beijing’s sights in the freezing snow. Read the rest of this entry »

For the past month we’ve been enjoying the kind of weather that makes even a city as urbanised as Beijing look rather lovely. The days are getting shorter and cooler, but the weird summery pollution haze that hung over August and September has disappeared, the sky is a ridiculous shade of blue, the trees are slowly undressing and the sweet potato, chestnut and satsuma vendors are lining the streets outside every subway station, making everything smell Autumnal. I haven’t even seen a little kid shitting in the middle of the pavement recently. It’s almost paradise.

Thanks to the National Holiday and a half-day week last week we’ve had plenty of opportunity to enjoy it, and we seriously made up for our neglect of sightseeing while mum was here. As well as the great wall we managed to squeeze all of the following sights, which, to avoid boring you rigid, I’ve attempted to describe in fifteen words or fewer:

The Summer Palace – built by a mad, megalomaniac empress, beautiful lake, nice crazy paving, fifteen million people there.

The Forbidden City – absolutely enormous, eight thousand rooms, austere atmosphere, fifteen million people there.

Tiannamen Square – Imposing, grey, brings to mind the worst of China, flags everywhere, fifteen million people there.

China National Art Gallery – fascinating exhibition on 60 years of communism (we think. The signs were in Mandarin).

The Temple of Heaven – gorgeous grounds, lots of people dancing, singing and strolling around, peaceful despite the crowds.

The Bird’s Nest Olympic Stadium – Immense, but depressingly unused. I got more excited than James and mum.

Jingshan Park – lovely little park with an amazing view of the Forbidden City. Fab.

Houhai District – sat on a roof terrace bar drinking beer and watching pigeon fanciers at work. Clever pigeons.

The Confucian Temple – crowd-free temple of learning and music, very reverential towards the great man.

Wangfujing shopping district – mum nearly shed tears over the loss of communist values. A commercial frenzy.

Here’s a small selection of the photos – apologies that they’re not up to usual standards; James was busy working many days so I took most of them.

[View with PicLens]

 

We don’t often devote an entire blog post to one attraction but The Great Wall of China probably deserves the honour, partly because it was one of the highlights of mum’s visit and partly because the photos are so good. For some reason I wasn’t expecting all that much of The Wall – how much better than the Setttle- Carlisle Railway could it be? – but I was blown away by it’s beauty, size and atmosphere, to which the photos do more justice than I can, so I’ll just fill in the background. Read the rest of this entry »

Lucky, lucky you – I don’t post for weeks and now you’ve got two in five days! I’m celebrating the purchase of my beautiful new camera and I’ve got shutter fever. So here’s a bumper crop of photos from around Beijing.

Read the rest of this entry »

Greetings readers, I’ve finally decided to emerge from my blog-shaped hermit home and say Nǐ Hǎo. I know, I know, it’s been a few weeks since I’ve channeled my diatribe onto the web but I’ve just had two glasses of imported chardonnay and I’m feeling insipid. Sorry I mean inspired. Read the rest of this entry »

Good morning class!

Whoops, sorry, I seem to be using this strange, chirpy teacher’s tone even outside the classroom; I think I might have lost my adult mind by December. I’m getting into the swing of things now though, and feeling far less worn out generally - I stayed up until 10.30 last night which is the early hours for me, even by pre-teaching standards.

One thing I’d forgotten whilst being a lazy bum was how much you look forward to the weekend, and this one got off to a cracking start when we were inexplicably dismissed from school at lunchtime on Friday (things operate on a need to know basis at the school and, as a rule of thumb, the foreign teachers don’t need to know), to allow the children to go home and practice for their national day celebrations, whatever that means. So we found ourselves three hours early for our Friday teacher’s meeting in the pool hall down the road and had a nice long afternoon of student-free relaxation. By the time I wandered home I was a little bit tipsy and promptly fell asleep on the sofa - another rock and roll Friday night for me.

On Saturday James and I met up with our friends Stelios and Hee-Jeong, who were passing through the city with their family on a mini-tour of China: Beijing, Xi’an, Shanghai and Hong Kong in the space of not very many days – more than we’ve seen in six weeks.  Seeing them was rather surreal since we kicked off our trip by staying at their apartment in Qatar (we would have returned the favour of accommodation but our flat is the size of a biscuit tin) so we’ve seen them more regularly than our parents over the last seven months.  James took them camera shopping in Beijing’s massive electronics district while I rudely excused myself to go and watch a rugby match.

On Sunday I woke up with a mild, rugby-related hangover and a sense of impending doom – I teach  at a private school every other week and have the class from hell, but a call from Stelios inviting us to dinner with his parents offered some light at the end of the tunnel. The only thing I look forward to more than dinner is free dinner, and this is exactly what we ended up getting thanks to Stelios’s ‘connections’ (you have to have them in China). His dad is some kind of dimplomat (sorry, Stelios, I don’t quite know how to describe his job), and he brought along the Cypriot ambassador and a very nice Chinese business man who, for reasons unknown to but fully taken advantage of by James and I, insisted on paying for several courses of fantastic sushi, sake and beer. Five months of rigorous chopstick training came in useful, since every time I reached over to hook some food I risked an international relations upset by potentially throwing raw fish eggs or similar all over the other guests. Luckily I didn’t disgrace myself (except for eating more a little bit more than my share of the food I suspect) and we had a lovely, international themed evening (two Eastern Europeans, a Korean, a Chinese, several Cyrpriots, and American and two Brits were in attendance) before Stelios and hee-Jeong jetted off to see the Terracotta Warriors. ..another Chinese sight we haven’t got round to seeing.