Although New Year’s eve waslast night, I got my first taste of New Year celebrations, Chinese style, on the way home from work last Monday: I was in the process of crossing the dual carriage way to get to my bus stop, and something rolled into the road and hit my foot. ‘That looks a bit like a firework’ I thought, but, being in the middle of a dual carriageway, I didn’t stop to investigate. Turns out it was a firework - about ten seconds later it exploded into a shower of blue and green sparks that lit up the road and sent a couple of cars swerving onto the grass verge. As I tottered towards the bus, eardrums ringing, I spotted the culprits -  group of old ladies huddled outside an aparment block lighting roman candles on the side of the road. The one in question had misfired, but not to worry, they had (literally) hundreds more where that came from and it was only a bit of practice for the main event.

For the past week or so, in the run up to Chinese New Year and the beginning of Spring Festival, Beijing’s skylines (not to mention the Beijing pavements and main roads) have been illuminated by some pretty impressive DIY pyrotechnic displays, so we were expecting something spectacular on the day itself. But not quite as spectacular, or terrifying, as it actually turned out to be.

Last night, to see in the Year of the Tiger, Beijing turned into a marginally less traumatic version of the Western Front. From the early afternoon, the streets began to empty of traffic. People would sporadically pop out of their apartment blocks to throw a string of extremely loud firecrackers onto the pavement and watch them take out a couple of dogs and maybe a tourist, and by late afternoon almost every shop, bank, kiosk and restaurant had closed its doors to allow the staff to go home to their families.

By the time we headed out of the apartment in the early evening there were rocket launches happening on evey corner, the sky was a sea of sparks and the air was think with the small of gunpowder. We stopped on the corner of our road to watch a group of guys letting of ffirecrackers until I took a direct hit to the eye, at which point we decided that underground travel might be the safest way to get to the Hutong we were headed for so we legged it to the subway. As usual, we were the only people who seemend to show any nervous reaction to the carnage: there were kids, old people and small dogs everywhere and none of them so much as flinched, even if they were actually holding a screaming, blazing heavy-duty firework as it went off (which seemed to be standard practice).

Apart from bleeding eardrums, we arrived safely at our friend’s apartment for a new year’s eve celebration which was authentic in every way apart from the fact  75% of the guests were westerners: two girls were churning out homemade jiao zi (meat dumplings that are the equivalent of Christmas turkey) and a tray kept appearing laden with shots of bai jiu, a very popular Chinese liquor which tastes like soil and acts like liquid nitrogen. As midnight approached we’d drunk enough of it to make jumping down onto the rickety balcony to get a better view of the fireworks a good idea.

And at midnight, everything went crackers. The sky turned into a riot of noise and colour as milions and millios of fireworks exploded across the city to bring inthe new year. Being seven stories up, I have no idea how many of them were part of organised displays and how many were DIY jobs, but they couldn’t have looked better. Seeing a city of sixteen million illuminated by the multi-coloured blaze of a billion fireworks is not really something you can describe very well, so I shall let Jamas’s photos do the talking - as always, the Chinese outdid themselves.

Happy New Year, China.

 

Not wanting to tempt fate, but it’s been a remarkable easy couple of weeks.  Before Christmas on average I’d have one or two ‘bad china days’ a week – where something pissed me off – be it a bureaucratic process for a trivial means, or just general the rudeness and lack of manners of Beijing’s masses.  Somehow, however the city feels different now we’re back.  The air is clear and crisp, the sun is shining and I’m pretty sure – but don’t quote me on this – that the lady in the police station even smiled when we registered our papers.  We got our internet connection installed today and the engineer was 15 minutes early.  What’s going on China?  You’ve changed.

Perhaps the upbeat mood in the city is because it’s Chinese New Year this weekend (imagine Christmas 10 times over).  As I peer out over Beijing this evening I can see the sparkle of fireworks all over the city as our fellow city dwellers practice ahead of the main event on Saturday.  Jeannie and I will be heading to Houhai – a huge lake in the city surrounded by narrow Hutongs and open-air beer houses.  We’ll be filling our bellies with dumplings and watching the fireworks over Beijing’s ancient drum and bell towers as we welcome in the Tiger Year.

Our Zodiac looks promising for 2010 – we’ve been told to “express our talents” and in return a “long-awaited opportunity will knock on your door”.  The prediction also gave us permission to party.  Lots.  Next on the list: find a talent to express whilst partying…

 

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.

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)…

We’d been warned by a few friends that Xi’an is a shitpit who recommended no more than flying in, visiting the warriors sharpish and flying straight out. How misguided they are – Xi’an’s a cracking little town to kill some time. The city is an old provincial capital surrounded on four sides by huge city walls and it’s home to a number of ancient attractions such as the obligatory bell and drum towers, a buzzing muslim quarter which only wakes up in the early evening and China’s largest mosque. The tranquil grounds and pretty snow covered pagodas make this mosque unlike any other you’ve ever seen. We spent many hours tottering around the narrow streets and eating plenty of delicious street food, however we weren’t here for the food…. booo.

We took a ride to Panda sanctuary two hours outside the city, home to 18 of the loveable bumbling bears. The previous night covered the enclosures with five inches of snow, but this didn’t stop the pandas from rolling around, having a good scratch and eating. What a cracking life. The highlight of the centre was two cheeky year-old pandas who were having a riot in their enclosure, bounding around in the snow, standing on their squat hind legs and providing much amusement by getting their big bear bums stuck in trees before falling to the ground with a thump. No wonder they’re endangered.

Of course, we’d come to Xi’an to visit one of China’s most popular tourist attractions – the Terracotta Army, which did not disappoint. We stood at the end of the main compound and looked across to see over 2,000 life size warriors with horses and chariots staring back at us, a most incredible sight. I learnt a couple of interesting facts – firstly they did not just excavate the site and find thousands of warriors standing there in formation. Oh no, 2000 years had taken it’s toll on the warriors for they were discovered in broken heap of millions of pieces. So far since they were discovered in 1974 they’ve managed to reconstruct 2000 warriors out of the estimated 8000 on the site. My second factoid is that emperor Qin (who commissioned the incredible army) was just 13 when he ordered their construction – it sounds to me like someone never got over playing with toy soldiers. The surreal highlight of the day came when our guide asked if we’d like to meet the farmer who found the warriors. I had visions of a mechanised wax model in a poorly assembled reconstruction of the discovery, but how naive of me. Mr Yang, one of the farmers who found the army is now employed to sit behind a desk whilst tourists shuffle past and gorp. How very Chinese.

We rounded off our stay in Xi’an with a drunken night in a terracotta army themed bar, drinking until the early hours with an interesting mix of travellers, ex-pats and a shitfaced mongolian who spoke pigeon German. The following day we returned to Beijing to give Matt his departing gift from China – the once in a lifetime opportunity to eat chilli-fried ducks heads. As we sat there crunching on the beaks and picking out the brains a local businessman came over to say hello. He was so impressed to see ‘whities’ eating this local delicacy that he invited us out for drinks. It looks like to get ahead here you just need to eat some head. Sorry. Appalling. Couldn’t resist.

 

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.

We headed out to the Temple of Heaven – this huge park in the south of the city is home to Beijing’s snappily titled iconic circular building “The Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests”.  The park itself is bustling, it’s full of locals practicing Tai Chi, kicking these strange feather things (no, not chickens) and singing karaoke – not bad for a snowy Tuesday morning.  A couple of hours of walking, a good blast of fresh air and a couple of snowballs thrown by Matt managed to clear away my hangover from the previous night nicely.  Schoolboy Skeath even excelled himself and built a snowman outside a temple, although it was a little concerning that the snowman was yellow.

Next on the agenda was Tiananman Square and the Forbidden City.  Whilst strolling the square an odd thing happened.  A couple of girls came over and muttered something about a photo – ahh, they’re tourists who want us to snap them together in front of Mao’s Mausoleum, so I reached for the camera.  How silly of me, Mao’s not the tourist attraction of choice for these giggling girlies,  we are.  So Matt and I took one for Blighty and posed arm in arm with a pretty Chinese girl each.  Over the last couple of days this has become quite a regular occurrence, the tourist-as-tourist-attraction highlights so far include an entire tour group of Chinese posing next to me in the Forbidden City. Matt then trumped this by getting swamped by a group in the Summer Palace and later a man almost tried to marry off his daughter to him, calling him a ‘handsome young man’ over and over again in Chinese.

In between becoming local celebrities we’ve also taken in a couple of temples, the drum and bell towers of Beijing, the Olympic park at night, eaten mouth-numbing Sichuan food and supped beers at Stelios’s favourite bar, Hooters (the one where waitressed have tight hot pants and big steamed dumplings).  Today we trekked out of the city to visit the Great Wall which, thanks to the snow, has been transformed into an Olympic-sized luge.  Needless to say I ended up on my ass a couple of times providing great amusement to the locals – I bet you didn’t see Michael Palin do that.

It’s a cracking day today, it’s chilly 4 degrees but the sky is clear blue.  We’re off to the train station to book tickets to Xi’an to see the terracotta army and we might even squeeze in a trip to Tianjin on China’s bullet train.

 

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.

 

The wall is more than 6000 kilometres long and it’s easily accessible from Beijing depending on which bit you want to go to: unsurprisingly (since it was built between the 5th BC and 16th AD centuries) large sections are no longer in great shape these days, but the areas within striking distance of the capital have been tarted up for tourists and are supposed to be spectacular but very, very, very busy. So, acting as tour guide for the day, I decided to ignore those bits and head for Huanghua, where not much restoration has happened and, consequently, not many tourists go (I had romantic ideas of standing alone at a sentry post, listening to the birds and scouting the countryside for marauding hoards of Mongols).

We hit the bus station early and, having been told by several fake taxi drivers that no public buses go to the wall, easily found a public bus to the wall. It took an hour to reach Huairou, a small town outside Beijing, where we were accosted by more fake taxi drivers and spent half an hour haggling a fare into the countryside. We spent the 25 minute car journey playing spot the wall – there were loads of false alarms (farmer’s fields, power station boundaries, electricity pylons etc) but James eventually spotted it, snaking round the side of a ridiculously steep, wooded hillside and then veering off at an insanely sharp angle behind another peak. With true Chinese tenacity, the architects of the wall picked the sharpest, highest and remotest path they could for the wall to follow, further discouraging attempts to penetrate it.

When we arrived at the entrance of the Huanghua section it was very quiet and there was a large sign saying something like ’due to renovations this section of the wall is closed to visitors, have a nice day, go home’. But our helpful taxi driver led us up a little path behind the deserted ticket booth where two enterprising gentlemen had erected a home-made ladder and were charging 20p for the privilege of risking the climb. There were a couple of dozen Chinese families milling around and taking photos near the ladder but they didn’t seem keen on walking far, so all we had to do was climb the death ladder, hike up a steep, re-paved section and we had the place to ourselves, pretty much free of charge.

Compared to the constant cacophony of Chinese noise we live with in Beijing, the quiet was incredibly atmospheric and it lasted until we’d walked for about a kilometre, when James pointed out he could hear music. Sure enough, at the next sentry post a little man was sitting on a wall squeezing out a tune on an accordion. ‘That sounds familiar’ mum said. ‘I could be wrong, but I think it’s from the Sound of Music’. And sure enough, in the middle of the Chinese mountains, perched on a deserted section of one of the world’s greatest engineering projects, was a little Chinese man playing ‘High on a Hill Stood a Lonely Goat’.

Other than that surreal little interlude and the odd bunch of teenagers the wall was ours for three steep kilometres, until we veered off onto a path that took us down through an orchard and allowed some incredible views back up the valley and over the hills. We eventually re-emerged in Huanghua in a cemetery (a little reminder of the millions of labourers who died over the centuries that the wall was constructed and reconstructed by the Chinese dynasties) and had a beer at a nice lady’s house while we waited for a taxi driver to ferry us back to the town.

Funnily enough, the wall in its day wasn’t all that successful as a military barrier - numerous foreign invaders broke through over the years – but as a psychological tool it must have been extremely effective: even now with it’s crumbly old ramparts it’s a very intimidating structure. It seems to say, on behalf of the Chinese, ‘we’re big, we’re strong, we have the man power and determination to build an 8000km wall because we want to keep you out’ – the ancient equivalent of ‘come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough’.