So New Year, or Spring Festival, is not a simple night of drinking followed by a quiet day of recovery as we know it in the west. It is a week long national holiday with each night having some amount of firework display (provided by locals, not professionals) and a time when familioes congregate around their elders and spend time together. Zhen and I are back in a hotel closer to the center of Beijing. In fact, we are just across the street from the Bird’s Nest, home of many of the 2008 Olympic events. Sadly, we moved out of her mom’s place, where we were for New Years Eve, New Years Day and the following day. We had a wonderful visit there and ate SO MUCH FOOD!

New Years day (31 Jan) we went to Ditan as I mentioned in a prior post. I did NOT get lost but I did eat 2 insects! Check that off the things to eat list. They weren’t as disgusting tasting as I expected, but the visual effect was really terrible. I couldn’t look at them after I had eaten one for fear of puking. I had four on my stick but only managed to eat 2. Zhen tried to video the whole thing but we encountered technical difficulties. If I run across another booth of insects, I’ll video myself eating a couple more. Apparently the scorpions are more delicious than the cicadas, which is what I ate.

After we finished downtown, we returned to Zhen’s mom’s place. We rode the bus into town and home. It’s only $0.40 per trip! For the last bit of the journey, we used a bicycle (actually tricycle) taxi. I’ve attached a picture of that as well. We bought a pack of cards and played Dizhu (a Chinese card game). Her mom mopped the floor with us and we had a great time!

Yesterday (1 Feb), we had a relaxing day at Zhen’s mom place and packed our bags. Her cousin came back out to pick us up and all five of us (myself, Zhen, his wife and Zhen’s mom) headed into Beijing for hotpot. I got lots of pictures of hotpot so I won’t describe it at length here, but it’s a fun way to eat! During that meal I tried some more new things. Eel and pigs kidney were a few. I assure you they aren’t as gross as they sound. I am finding out that if you don’t want to starve in China, you need to expand your culinary horizons beyond the real of slabs of meat and sides of veggies. In fact, you can throw that concept in the garbage, I haven’t seen a slab of meat with a side of veggies since I got here and I don’t expect I will since we are purposely avoiding western food.

My last update came after my first complete day in China. Several eventful days have passed since then.

The day after we visited the Forbidden City, the huge palace of emperors past, we visited the temple of heaven. A place where the emperors worshiped their gods, that has large gardens various temples. It was not as vast as the Forbidden City and had far fewer buildings, but it was still very beautiful and quite awe inspiring to be in such an ancient place.

That evening we went to the famous Laoshen Tea House to see a traditional Chinese show. There were a number of different styles of acts, much like a variety show. Some musical, some comedic sketches, but the best acts were the Peking Opera act, think painted faces and annoyingly high pitched singing, and the Shezuan mask changer, which was the best. These traditional performers start the show with many layers of silk face masks and they dance around and change the masks as they dance. The amazing thing is that the mask is changed by some secret mechanism and it changes in the blink of an eye (much faster actually)! So it makes for an interesting effect. The performer walks out into the audience and changes these masks right in front of you too, it’s pretty amazing.

The next day, new years eve, we checked out of our hotel and headed to Zhen’s mom’s place. There we were treated to a giant feast of Chinese food. Her cousin, and his wife joined us and it was a tonne of fun. Obviously, I’m not my usual gregarious self in these environments where my language skills are so poor, but we all managed to have lots of fun and… as the clock drew closer and closer to midnight, the barrage of fireworks gradually worked up into a frenzy! It was totally amazing. By midnight Beijing was a continuous rumble of thunderous fireworks, flashes and booms! We ventured out right after midnight to set off our own arsenal of fireworks and saw lots of neighbors doing the same. I saw a young boy with his father setting off some pretty spectacular explosive devices and I couldn’t help but think what a great day this must be for a young boy (or even an older one, namely me)! You get to set off fireworks like crazy! I got a couple videos which will hopefully give you the idea. 

For New Years Day we are headed back to the center of Beijing, Ditan, a traditional new years day gathering place. It wasn’t as crowded as I imagined, probably because most people head home for Spring Festival (New Year) and many Beijingers are not from Beijing.

After a lengthy but uneventful flight from Ottawa via Toronto, I finally landed in Beijing! This is the furthest from home I have ever been and I am really excited because I am not only visiting the capital of one of the oldest cultures in the world, but I am also lucky enough to have a local to show me around. Lu Zhen met me at the airport and we began our Beijing trip together. I left Ottawa at about 10:00 am on the 26th of January and landed in Beijing around 4:30 pm on the 27th. After I landed and we checked into our hotel, we went for supper near the hotel. Needless to say, the food was as authentic Chinese as it gets. A strategy I use to deal with jet lag is to never sleep on transcontinental flights. So when the time finally came, I slept like a baby.

Then next day, we went to the forbidden city. The Forbidden City was the Palace of the old emperors. We each rented audio guides, which detect your location in the palace and recount interesting facts about the all the various temples and court yards. After the palace, we toured an interesting district called Nanluoguxiang. This area featured lots of old shops in traditional one story houses. Effectively, it was the opposite of the palace, a place where commoners used to live, eat, drink, buy and sell. I saw some fans and parasols which would interest the girls, but they were a bit overpriced since we were in a tourist district and it was only my second day, so I didn’t make any purchases. Finally, we returned to the hotel to freshen up and ended the evening with a lovely supper with Zhen’s mom, their family friend. We had some amazing Roast Duck and a bunch of other stuff.