I had heard about the existence of “Chinese New Year” over the years, but only recently did I learn that it’s also called Spring Festival, and only last weekend did I learn how big a deal it is in China.
As with Easter and Passover, the date varies from year to year. Thanks to Wikipedia, I now know that all three holidays are related to both the moon and the timing of either the equinox or the solstice.
For the nerds among us:
Easter is the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox.
From Wikipedia: “Passover begins on the 15th day of the month of Nisan, which corresponds to the full moon of Nisan, the first month of the Hebrew calendar, in accordance with the Hebrew Bible. Passover is a spring festival, so the 14th of Nisan begins on the night of a full moon after the vernal equinox.”
From Wikipedia again: “In the Gregorian calendar, Chinese New Year falls on different dates each year, a date between January 21 and February 20. In the Chinese calendar, winter solstice must occur in the 11th month, which means that Chinese New Year usually falls on the second new moon after the winter solstice (rarely the third if an intercalary month intervenes).”
This year, the Chinese New Year began on Sunday, February 14. Saturday was therefore New Year’s eve. Being lucky enough to be here for this holiday season, I have had long delicious feasts with two sets of extended families, where Jamie and I were welcomed to join festivities with grandparents, in-laws, and kids of various ages. It’s fun to see different customs and to eat Chinese food that is almost nothing like what we call “Chinese food” in the US. Around here mutton is a staple, though I don’t think that would be true in other parts of China. In the meal we just had at Miss Ji’s place, downstairs from Jamie, I was told that mutton was something they had all the time, whereas the “Beijing Duck” was special for the holiday feast.
Lots of people are taken aback by the fact that Jamie didn’t go to his family for the holidays. Spring Festival is in that respect like Christmas for us, but more so. It seems like every last Chinese person on earth tries to go/come home for the holiday. The kids get 40 days off from school, there seemed to be enough fireworks just in Yulin to supply the entire US on the Fourth of July, and the celebrating lasts for six days, during which time everyone is on vacation.
On Saturday, New Year’s Eve, Jamie and I were invited to the home of his colleague Liu Yanfeng, who spent some months in Readfield as an AFS teacher 5 or 6 years ago, and who was the connection through whom Jamie found his job. Yanfeng is married and has a daughter, JiaoJiao, who is eight years old by our measure. By Chinese measure, she’s nine. Here, you are “1” on the day you are born. Then, everyone gets a year older on New Year’s day. So a baby born the day before the New Year would be “2” after being alive for a day or two.
It makes perfect sense to them. ;)
We went to Yanfeng’s house in the late morning and had a lovely lunch. There was a soup packed with several kinds of meat, some noodles and vegies, and other things that as usual I couldn’t identify. Very tasty. There were also steamed dumplings (pork filling, something like you can get in Chinese restaurants at home), plus some doughnut-shaped things that were made with millet meal. I ate several of these and loved them.
After lunch we talked. I had brought some books for JiaoJiao, and she looked at them for a long time. One of the them was about Helen Keller, and I learned that Chinese children learn all about Helen Keller and that she is very well-known in China. Later, JiaoJiao read to me from her English textbook. Her English pronunciation is really good and she is quick to pick up new things. She also danced for us, and that was fun too.
Eventually Yanfeng’s brother picked us up to go to their parents’ house for the rest of the day’s celebrations. There we met Yanfeng’s parents, the brother’s wife and child (16 months old, named TongTong), and also Yanfeng’s sister and her husband and son. Several of these people spoke at least a little English, so I was able to talk to them a bit without Jamie having to translate every exchange.
TongTong cried when we walked into the house. She was shy, we were strangers. The houses aren’t kept all that warm, so she was wearing warm clothes that made her look as round as she was tall. Eventually she got less shy, until she was willing to stand between where Jamie and I were sitting on the couch and to play with us a bit. At one point she dropped something on the floor and I said, “uh-oh,” and she immediately imitated it and then kept saying “uh-oh” for the rest of the day. She also referred to me by the word for “grandma” or “old lady.” Perceptive kid. ;)
Dinner was served on a little table in the front room of the apartment. There were couches and chairs pulled up around the table, and Jamie and I were repeatedly urged to sit down and start eating. When we first came in there were snacks, then Yanfeng’s mother and the other cooks (it seemed to be a joint enterprise) brought in one dish at a time until there were at least a dozen different things to choose from. Yanfeng said that we should eat, because it’s not the custom in China for everyone to wait til everyone else has food, or til all the food is served. Once again I have no idea what some of the dishes were, but there was a huge beautiful bowl with a whole fish in it (steamed, I think), there were a couple of dishes that were mostly meat (including lamb), and there were several kinds of vegies and mixed dishes. I tried everything and loved several of the dishes to the point of asking for the recipe for one of them (bits of pork, cilantro, something like scallions, other green vegies, garlic, I don’t know what else). My least favorite was lamb, but that’s nothing new.
The custom is for everyone to pick food out of the common bowls with chopsticks. You put your food into your own little bowl, on top of rice if you’ve taken some rice. People pick around in the dishes to find the nicest bits, and people do keep eating a little at a time for a long, long time. Yanfeng’s father, who didn’t say two words the whole day, several times offered food to Jamie and me, making sure we tried the specialties. He would pick something up with his chopsticks and hold it out to us, and I think it would have been rude to refuse. I did end up leaving some of my lamb in my bowl, but no one commented on that.
We were offered wine, beer, tea, soda, and water. I had tea and water. After the meal was over and the table was cleared, at a time when Jamie was outside doing fireworks (I truly will get to the fireworks eventually), I was asked if I wanted some “millet wine.” They said it wasn’t really wine and wasn’t alcoholic, so I said I’d try a bit. It was yellow, sort of creamy, served in a bowl, a bit sweet, a bit tangy, and fermented in some way. I didn’t mind it but didn’t like it enough to finish my bowl (which was quite a bit more than a tiny bit).
Later in the evening there was Mah-Jong, and eventually we went outside to set off fire crackers of various kinds. But that’s another installment.
Tuesday, 16 February 2010
Sunday, 14 February 2010
Seeing the sights in Beijing: Sunday and Monday
Sunday:
Tiananmen Square is massive. We saw it on the day after a night of snow, and the air was even more opaque than usual, so even the weather added to the feeling of grimness. There is nothing “pretty” or human-scale anywhere in sight. The only thing I can think the place is useful for is to have space for massed armies, or maybe massed populace listening to speeches, or ... what happened in 1989. There are no trees, no benches. Maybe there is some greenery when it’s not winter, but there was none the day we visited. A lot of my impressions of China are going to be colored (no pun intended) by the fact that I’m here at a time when everything is brown. The mountainous country on the Great Wall trek was brown, and Jamie says that in the summer it is overwhelmingly green. So maybe there is a softening touch around Tiananmen Square in the summer time too.
Jamie and I were surprised, when we talked about it later, at how differently we think about Tiananmen Square. I don’t remember ever having heard much about it before the events of 1989, and they are still what I most associate it with. From that point of view, I’m glad I went there in some vague way of honoring what people did there, but it’s not a place that would draw me back the way places I visited in the UK would. Jamie doesn’t have the same strong association with the events of 1989, but we did agree that the major message of the whole complex -- the Square and the Forbidden City -- is of overwhelming “state” power.
In the Forbidden City, we didn’t have time to explore every little side branch. But the spaces in the central sequences are massive: again, armies? Until the garden at the very back, there is no greenery, nothing soft, nothing of human scale. There’s a beauty in the ornate roofs and ceilings -- all that intricate woodwork and color. And I do wonder if, as in a medieval fort/castle let’s say, there was actually a lot of everyday bustle in those huge spaces when the place was actually in use: market stalls, blacksmith shops, stuff like that.
The place was crowded, but not as much as it would have been in different weather or in a different season. The vast majority of the visitors were Chinese -- it’s vacation season here, 40 days around Spring Festival.
Monday:
We went to two temples and a shopping center.
The Temple of the Lamas, or Yonghegong, is, depending on which source you believe, the largest Buddhist temple in Beijing, or in all of China. After a long gap, it has been functioning as a monastery again since 1980. It felt more crowded than the Forbidden City, again with mostly Chinese people. There are monks tending the various indoor spaces, and most of the visitors were buying incense sticks, lighting them, and doing a series of bows to the temples and Buddha statues in all the buildings (there were many). We came into one of the courtyards between buildings and found a bunch of couples with baby buggies. They were all non-Chinese, maybe a group that had come here to adopt.
This place was beautiful -- my favorite “sight” after the Great wall. Sad to say, it was forbidden to take pictures inside the buildings. There were huge statues of various Buddhas and boddhisattvas, there were ancient boxes of manuscripts, places to bow and offer incense, and many other interesting things.
About half a mile away from Yonghegong is Kongmaio, the Confucius Temple. It’s similar in being a large complex of buildings (some connected, some not) and courtyards, but it’s smaller than Yonghegong. There is a small museum devoted to the life and thought of Confucius, and there’s a section where there are tall standing stones inscribed with the names of scholars (Jin Shi) who passed certain important exams in long-ago empires.
We had taken the subway to Tiananmen Square on Sunday, but on Monday I proposed that given the low cost of everything here, we should start taking cabs to save my achy knees. After leaving the Confucius Temple we caught a cab to the Workers Stadium (one of the venues of the 2008 Olympics), then walked to a knock-off mall called Ya Show. This was the first (and it turned out to be the only) place where I saw any number of non-Chinese people. In the food court I heard a number of languages -- none of them English. In the food court was also where I decided to start taking pictures of “Chinglish.”
Pictures here, here, and here.
Tiananmen Square is massive. We saw it on the day after a night of snow, and the air was even more opaque than usual, so even the weather added to the feeling of grimness. There is nothing “pretty” or human-scale anywhere in sight. The only thing I can think the place is useful for is to have space for massed armies, or maybe massed populace listening to speeches, or ... what happened in 1989. There are no trees, no benches. Maybe there is some greenery when it’s not winter, but there was none the day we visited. A lot of my impressions of China are going to be colored (no pun intended) by the fact that I’m here at a time when everything is brown. The mountainous country on the Great Wall trek was brown, and Jamie says that in the summer it is overwhelmingly green. So maybe there is a softening touch around Tiananmen Square in the summer time too.
Jamie and I were surprised, when we talked about it later, at how differently we think about Tiananmen Square. I don’t remember ever having heard much about it before the events of 1989, and they are still what I most associate it with. From that point of view, I’m glad I went there in some vague way of honoring what people did there, but it’s not a place that would draw me back the way places I visited in the UK would. Jamie doesn’t have the same strong association with the events of 1989, but we did agree that the major message of the whole complex -- the Square and the Forbidden City -- is of overwhelming “state” power.
In the Forbidden City, we didn’t have time to explore every little side branch. But the spaces in the central sequences are massive: again, armies? Until the garden at the very back, there is no greenery, nothing soft, nothing of human scale. There’s a beauty in the ornate roofs and ceilings -- all that intricate woodwork and color. And I do wonder if, as in a medieval fort/castle let’s say, there was actually a lot of everyday bustle in those huge spaces when the place was actually in use: market stalls, blacksmith shops, stuff like that.
The place was crowded, but not as much as it would have been in different weather or in a different season. The vast majority of the visitors were Chinese -- it’s vacation season here, 40 days around Spring Festival.
Monday:
We went to two temples and a shopping center.
The Temple of the Lamas, or Yonghegong, is, depending on which source you believe, the largest Buddhist temple in Beijing, or in all of China. After a long gap, it has been functioning as a monastery again since 1980. It felt more crowded than the Forbidden City, again with mostly Chinese people. There are monks tending the various indoor spaces, and most of the visitors were buying incense sticks, lighting them, and doing a series of bows to the temples and Buddha statues in all the buildings (there were many). We came into one of the courtyards between buildings and found a bunch of couples with baby buggies. They were all non-Chinese, maybe a group that had come here to adopt.
This place was beautiful -- my favorite “sight” after the Great wall. Sad to say, it was forbidden to take pictures inside the buildings. There were huge statues of various Buddhas and boddhisattvas, there were ancient boxes of manuscripts, places to bow and offer incense, and many other interesting things.
About half a mile away from Yonghegong is Kongmaio, the Confucius Temple. It’s similar in being a large complex of buildings (some connected, some not) and courtyards, but it’s smaller than Yonghegong. There is a small museum devoted to the life and thought of Confucius, and there’s a section where there are tall standing stones inscribed with the names of scholars (Jin Shi) who passed certain important exams in long-ago empires.
We had taken the subway to Tiananmen Square on Sunday, but on Monday I proposed that given the low cost of everything here, we should start taking cabs to save my achy knees. After leaving the Confucius Temple we caught a cab to the Workers Stadium (one of the venues of the 2008 Olympics), then walked to a knock-off mall called Ya Show. This was the first (and it turned out to be the only) place where I saw any number of non-Chinese people. In the food court I heard a number of languages -- none of them English. In the food court was also where I decided to start taking pictures of “Chinglish.”
Pictures here, here, and here.
Saturday, 13 February 2010
The Great Wall
Uploading photos into blog posts is slow and tedious, so
here's a link to some pictures of our trip to the Great Wall.
here's a link to some pictures of our trip to the Great Wall.
Friday, 12 February 2010
First Impressions
At least right around here, if you removed all the Chinese characters from sight it could be a city in any number of places; there is nothing particularly Chinese about it until you look more closely and see some of the decorative motifs in restaurants or businesses. There are many many little shops, all crowded to the last inch with stuff. Funny how recognizable a box that holds a tube of toothpaste is, even if it’s covered with Chinese characters instead of the word “toothpaste.” On the other hand, lots of goods have labels in both Chinese and English -- some of the toothpaste says, among other inscrutable (to me) things, “Colgate.”
There are lots of little hole-in-the-wall places that sell fresh-cooked food, either as the entire enterprise or as one corner of a more varied enterprise. We bought some bottled water in a tiny shop -- not much bigger than a big closet for a lot of Americans -- that sold a mix of grocery items, and in one little corner of it there was a round griddle, and the woman made me a wrap on the griddle, broke an egg on it, got it all cooked, then filled it with ... I don’t know what, but it was very tasty to eat while walking along the street in the gathering dusk, my first meal in China. Jamie got something similar from another hole in the wall which was literally a guy crouched behind a glass-fronted opening between two stores, cooking and selling a variety of stuffed wraps. There are places that sell what passes for sweets -- pastries, cakes, stuffed things -- stuffed with what, I have no idea. But they’re tasty too.
We spent a couple of hours walking around, eating, and window shopping last night, then, having had all of maybe eleven hours of sleep in the previous 2½ days, I collapsed into bed at about 7:30 last night and slept, with almost no breaks, til 8:30 this morning.
We got up, went out again, and ate in a place that I can only compare with let’s say Panera -- cheap decent food ordered at a counter. Very tasty again. I had wonton soup (of a sort) and pot stickers.
We walked and talked and walked and talked -- and I was back in bed by 12:30 and slept the afternoon away. In other words, 18 of my first 26 hours in China were spent sleeping. I am babying myself about it because I have a sore throat, and I want to try to keep from getting sicker. So whether I’m still tired because of a virus, jet lag, or just travel exhaustion, suffice to say I don’t have any energy.
Though -- after a really nice dinner in a sit-down restaurant, I am feeling a little better at last.
We had Peking Duck for dinner, and dumplings, and a dish that was a pile of spinach with peanuts in a sweetish sauce. The menu had stuff like tripe and many other body parts of ducks and cows and pigs that have never been seen on any American menu I’ve had the pleasure of reading. Also, the names of things are not always revealing: what does “Three Fresh Wontons” mean? It doesn’t mean 3 wontons, it means 3 ingredients inside them, but which 3 ... I don’t know.
It was snowing when we got out of the restaurant.
*****
This is pretty random, but it’s a day’s worth of first impressions. It’s too early to make this judgment, except that based on what I’ve read about Beijing it will probably hold true: there’s no sky. One of the reasons I haven’t just picked up and moved to Cambridge in the years since Maddy went off to college is that there’s no night sky to speak of. In Cambridge there’s a dark gray bowl overhead with about 6 faint stars in it, at best, and occasionally you get a glimpse of the moon. But the sky can be gorgeously blue in the daytime. Here, there seems to be no blue sky at all, at least by my standards, just a gray-brown haze. And of course, no night sky either. As with Cambridge and the night, I doubt many people who live here notice much, or care. There are other things to pay attention to.
[Update a few days later: we have had some “sunny” days, when the sky was sort of blue, at least you could tell that behind the mix of thin clouds and air pollution there was some blue. Nothing like home. I said something like this to Jamie and he said that he reckoned he would have to rethink his ideas of blue sky when he went back home again.]
Sunday 2/7/10, almost 9 p.m.
I woke up at 3:00 a.m. and haven’t been back to bed. We had breakfast at the same place as yesterday, called in English “Fastest Tastiest.” (Yes, there is a big sign outside with that name on it. I’ll try to post a picture.) We went to Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. (Whew. More on that later.) We walked and took the subway. The air was thick and hazy, it was a white world all around after last night’s snowfall. Later we had hot pot for dinner and did a little shopping, by which time I was ready for more sleep.
The nearest thing I can compare hot pot to is fondue. There is a big vessel/bowl of water in the center of the table, and in this case there was a metal “tower” in the center of that, kept warm by some method (charcoal?) that we couldn’t figure out. Jamie says this is not the modern method of doing hot pot that he has seen elsewhere, which makes sense since the restaurant was called “Old Beijing” and all the staff were dressed in Manchu (?) style. I’m just guessing, but the place was obviously trying to recreate someone's idea of the old days.
When we came in, the greeter shouted something toward the upstairs level, and Jamie suggested that he was saying, “Hey, some foreigners are here.” But he did that whenever anyone came in, so it wasn’t just for us.
Jamie ordered 5 or 6 things off a menu that I couldn’t read -- fish balls, thin slices of mutton, sliced potatoes, big leaves of some kind of cabbage, another vegetable that I couldn’t identify. We dropped bits of everything into the boiling water, waited for stuff to cook, ate all of it with a very spicy sauce that had a mix of flavors: peanuts, something fishy, some scallions maybe, other things I couldn’t identify. (P.S. I even liked the mutton. That was a big surprise.)
After that -- long overdue bedtime.
There are lots of little hole-in-the-wall places that sell fresh-cooked food, either as the entire enterprise or as one corner of a more varied enterprise. We bought some bottled water in a tiny shop -- not much bigger than a big closet for a lot of Americans -- that sold a mix of grocery items, and in one little corner of it there was a round griddle, and the woman made me a wrap on the griddle, broke an egg on it, got it all cooked, then filled it with ... I don’t know what, but it was very tasty to eat while walking along the street in the gathering dusk, my first meal in China. Jamie got something similar from another hole in the wall which was literally a guy crouched behind a glass-fronted opening between two stores, cooking and selling a variety of stuffed wraps. There are places that sell what passes for sweets -- pastries, cakes, stuffed things -- stuffed with what, I have no idea. But they’re tasty too.
We spent a couple of hours walking around, eating, and window shopping last night, then, having had all of maybe eleven hours of sleep in the previous 2½ days, I collapsed into bed at about 7:30 last night and slept, with almost no breaks, til 8:30 this morning.
We got up, went out again, and ate in a place that I can only compare with let’s say Panera -- cheap decent food ordered at a counter. Very tasty again. I had wonton soup (of a sort) and pot stickers.
We walked and talked and walked and talked -- and I was back in bed by 12:30 and slept the afternoon away. In other words, 18 of my first 26 hours in China were spent sleeping. I am babying myself about it because I have a sore throat, and I want to try to keep from getting sicker. So whether I’m still tired because of a virus, jet lag, or just travel exhaustion, suffice to say I don’t have any energy.
Though -- after a really nice dinner in a sit-down restaurant, I am feeling a little better at last.
We had Peking Duck for dinner, and dumplings, and a dish that was a pile of spinach with peanuts in a sweetish sauce. The menu had stuff like tripe and many other body parts of ducks and cows and pigs that have never been seen on any American menu I’ve had the pleasure of reading. Also, the names of things are not always revealing: what does “Three Fresh Wontons” mean? It doesn’t mean 3 wontons, it means 3 ingredients inside them, but which 3 ... I don’t know.
It was snowing when we got out of the restaurant.
*****
This is pretty random, but it’s a day’s worth of first impressions. It’s too early to make this judgment, except that based on what I’ve read about Beijing it will probably hold true: there’s no sky. One of the reasons I haven’t just picked up and moved to Cambridge in the years since Maddy went off to college is that there’s no night sky to speak of. In Cambridge there’s a dark gray bowl overhead with about 6 faint stars in it, at best, and occasionally you get a glimpse of the moon. But the sky can be gorgeously blue in the daytime. Here, there seems to be no blue sky at all, at least by my standards, just a gray-brown haze. And of course, no night sky either. As with Cambridge and the night, I doubt many people who live here notice much, or care. There are other things to pay attention to.
[Update a few days later: we have had some “sunny” days, when the sky was sort of blue, at least you could tell that behind the mix of thin clouds and air pollution there was some blue. Nothing like home. I said something like this to Jamie and he said that he reckoned he would have to rethink his ideas of blue sky when he went back home again.]
Sunday 2/7/10, almost 9 p.m.
I woke up at 3:00 a.m. and haven’t been back to bed. We had breakfast at the same place as yesterday, called in English “Fastest Tastiest.” (Yes, there is a big sign outside with that name on it. I’ll try to post a picture.) We went to Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. (Whew. More on that later.) We walked and took the subway. The air was thick and hazy, it was a white world all around after last night’s snowfall. Later we had hot pot for dinner and did a little shopping, by which time I was ready for more sleep.
The nearest thing I can compare hot pot to is fondue. There is a big vessel/bowl of water in the center of the table, and in this case there was a metal “tower” in the center of that, kept warm by some method (charcoal?) that we couldn’t figure out. Jamie says this is not the modern method of doing hot pot that he has seen elsewhere, which makes sense since the restaurant was called “Old Beijing” and all the staff were dressed in Manchu (?) style. I’m just guessing, but the place was obviously trying to recreate someone's idea of the old days.
When we came in, the greeter shouted something toward the upstairs level, and Jamie suggested that he was saying, “Hey, some foreigners are here.” But he did that whenever anyone came in, so it wasn’t just for us.
Jamie ordered 5 or 6 things off a menu that I couldn’t read -- fish balls, thin slices of mutton, sliced potatoes, big leaves of some kind of cabbage, another vegetable that I couldn’t identify. We dropped bits of everything into the boiling water, waited for stuff to cook, ate all of it with a very spicy sauce that had a mix of flavors: peanuts, something fishy, some scallions maybe, other things I couldn’t identify. (P.S. I even liked the mutton. That was a big surprise.)
After that -- long overdue bedtime.
Travel and Arrival
Notes from February 6, 2010, 9:31 p.m. Beijing
The traveling was smooth and uneventful. All the planes were on time, even early. The thirteen-hour flight between Newark and Beijing was about as expected: hard to get through. After we were fed the first and most substantial of three in-flight meals, I slept for about an hour and a half. I finished my book five hours before the flight was over, then alternated between trying to sleep, eating again (and again), watching the flight map and statistics, and looking at the beginnings of movies or snippets from old TV shows (The King and I, LOTR III, The Philadelphia Story, Hill Street Blues), and playing freecell -- all of the latter on the little screen on the back of the seat in front of me. There were 338 movies to choose from, though that tally is a little deceptive because it includes, in many cases, several versions of the same movie but with different subtitles (Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese). When you choose a movie to watch, in many cases you also get the choice of a bunch of different dubbings (many more languages than just Arabic, Hebrew, and Chinese). Contrary to what the clerk told me when I called Continental last week, I could find no evidence of an outlet into which to plug my computer, but that was okay because my computer was out of reach in the overhead bin anyhow.
We flew north out of Newark, over Albany and Montreal and eventually over far northern Canada. Eventually we headed southward across Siberia and Mongolia. The result was that out of the only window I could see that had an open shutter, what was visible for most of the flight was a pre-dawn or post-sunset sky -- for hours and hours and hours.
The flight map makes it easier to visualize why the sunrise/sunset thing is happening. The global view shows the areas of daylight and night moving across the surface of the earth, and we were flying not that far from the demarcation line for most of the trip.
*****
Finally -- Beijing. It was exciting to get sight of it, and a little depressing as well. The air looked a lot like brown pea soup, and given that it’s winter but there’s no snow-cover, the ground looked all brown and dusty as well.
We landed at 2:40 p.m. The process from there included a gate where we had to hand in a form (filled in while still in flight) about whether we might have H1N1 flu, with the threat of quarantine if “they” thought we might. Then a big hall with maybe 15 lines for immigration: 2/3 of the lines for “Chinese Nationals,” 1/3 for “Foreigners.” This took a very long time; several of the people ahead of me did not get waved through quickly. I saw one young man led away by a customs officer -- maybe to more questioning? I don’t know. I got through with no trouble, then waited for my baggage. When I finally came out and saw Jamie in the crowd, I was happy and relieved beyond words. When they had given us the flu/quarantine form on the plane, all I could think of was what a fiasco it would be to be quarantined for swine flu instead of finally, after all that travel, meeting up with Jamie. Luckily it didn’t happen that way.
We took a long cab ride with a driver who wasn’t sure where the hotel was, even though Jamie had printed out some Google Maps pictures. But she got us here with no trouble. We’re in a neighborhood that is local instead of touristy (I’ve seen only a handful of Caucasian faces right around here in almost a week), urban but not skyscraper urban. The room is tiny but clean and pleasant, just about big enough for us and all the luggage. We got here at about 5:00 o’clock, took a breath, and went out to see the neighborhood and get some dinner. As we started walking down a big street Jamie said, “Any impressions so far?” Exhausted and overwhelmed and hardly able to believe I was actually here, all I could say was, “Lotta Chinese people.”
:)
The traveling was smooth and uneventful. All the planes were on time, even early. The thirteen-hour flight between Newark and Beijing was about as expected: hard to get through. After we were fed the first and most substantial of three in-flight meals, I slept for about an hour and a half. I finished my book five hours before the flight was over, then alternated between trying to sleep, eating again (and again), watching the flight map and statistics, and looking at the beginnings of movies or snippets from old TV shows (The King and I, LOTR III, The Philadelphia Story, Hill Street Blues), and playing freecell -- all of the latter on the little screen on the back of the seat in front of me. There were 338 movies to choose from, though that tally is a little deceptive because it includes, in many cases, several versions of the same movie but with different subtitles (Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese). When you choose a movie to watch, in many cases you also get the choice of a bunch of different dubbings (many more languages than just Arabic, Hebrew, and Chinese). Contrary to what the clerk told me when I called Continental last week, I could find no evidence of an outlet into which to plug my computer, but that was okay because my computer was out of reach in the overhead bin anyhow.
We flew north out of Newark, over Albany and Montreal and eventually over far northern Canada. Eventually we headed southward across Siberia and Mongolia. The result was that out of the only window I could see that had an open shutter, what was visible for most of the flight was a pre-dawn or post-sunset sky -- for hours and hours and hours.
The flight map makes it easier to visualize why the sunrise/sunset thing is happening. The global view shows the areas of daylight and night moving across the surface of the earth, and we were flying not that far from the demarcation line for most of the trip.
*****
Finally -- Beijing. It was exciting to get sight of it, and a little depressing as well. The air looked a lot like brown pea soup, and given that it’s winter but there’s no snow-cover, the ground looked all brown and dusty as well.
We landed at 2:40 p.m. The process from there included a gate where we had to hand in a form (filled in while still in flight) about whether we might have H1N1 flu, with the threat of quarantine if “they” thought we might. Then a big hall with maybe 15 lines for immigration: 2/3 of the lines for “Chinese Nationals,” 1/3 for “Foreigners.” This took a very long time; several of the people ahead of me did not get waved through quickly. I saw one young man led away by a customs officer -- maybe to more questioning? I don’t know. I got through with no trouble, then waited for my baggage. When I finally came out and saw Jamie in the crowd, I was happy and relieved beyond words. When they had given us the flu/quarantine form on the plane, all I could think of was what a fiasco it would be to be quarantined for swine flu instead of finally, after all that travel, meeting up with Jamie. Luckily it didn’t happen that way.
We took a long cab ride with a driver who wasn’t sure where the hotel was, even though Jamie had printed out some Google Maps pictures. But she got us here with no trouble. We’re in a neighborhood that is local instead of touristy (I’ve seen only a handful of Caucasian faces right around here in almost a week), urban but not skyscraper urban. The room is tiny but clean and pleasant, just about big enough for us and all the luggage. We got here at about 5:00 o’clock, took a breath, and went out to see the neighborhood and get some dinner. As we started walking down a big street Jamie said, “Any impressions so far?” Exhausted and overwhelmed and hardly able to believe I was actually here, all I could say was, “Lotta Chinese people.”
:)
Tuesday, 2 February 2010
Packed and ready
My bags are packed, I'm (almost) ready to go....
It's hard to believe that if all goes well I'll be seeing Jamie -- in China -- in about 50 hours.
After more than a year of dithering about making a trip, and months of procrastination in deciding when to go, and endless to-do lists, shopping trips, and packing dilemmas: everything is done. Or if it's not done, it's not going to get done.
Maddy has set me up for the trip by taking me shopping to get me an early birthday present: my first iPod. She is helping me select, download, upload, and generally gather music, and she supplied three movies on DVD that I might want to watch on the long flights between Newark and Beijing. I also have a couple of books in my bag, just in case I get jaded with using electronic gadgetry.
The biggest challenge will probably be the luggage. I have the biggest hard-sided suitcase LL Bean sells, plus a large knapsack of books that Jamie chose for his department (as well as some gift books), plus my carry-on backpack. The first two will be checked, and Maddy will help me manage them in Portland. The hard part will be getting them through Customs in Beijing. But then Jamie will be there to add muscle to the enterprise.
For now -- bedtime.
It's hard to believe that if all goes well I'll be seeing Jamie -- in China -- in about 50 hours.
After more than a year of dithering about making a trip, and months of procrastination in deciding when to go, and endless to-do lists, shopping trips, and packing dilemmas: everything is done. Or if it's not done, it's not going to get done.
Maddy has set me up for the trip by taking me shopping to get me an early birthday present: my first iPod. She is helping me select, download, upload, and generally gather music, and she supplied three movies on DVD that I might want to watch on the long flights between Newark and Beijing. I also have a couple of books in my bag, just in case I get jaded with using electronic gadgetry.
The biggest challenge will probably be the luggage. I have the biggest hard-sided suitcase LL Bean sells, plus a large knapsack of books that Jamie chose for his department (as well as some gift books), plus my carry-on backpack. The first two will be checked, and Maddy will help me manage them in Portland. The hard part will be getting them through Customs in Beijing. But then Jamie will be there to add muscle to the enterprise.
For now -- bedtime.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)