Quarantine

In the States, the day after Thanksgiving marks the commencement of holiday shopping and its attendant rampant advertising and discount campaigns. And, as much as we may not like to admit it, the month-long Christmas/Hanukkah fever is shared by many an American, unless you are Muslim or a Jehovah’s Witness.

Perhaps because the majority of Americans celebrate either Christmas or Hanukkah, the proliferation of Santa Clauses, christmas trees, elves, menorahs, and the ever-present Christmas song doesn’t stand out as strange,  purely commercial, or misplaced.

In Beijing, however, everyone – Chinese or expat – can easily view the holiday season in the same way that singles perceive Valentine’s Day: as a commercialized, commodity-driven month.

Cashier wearing a Santa hat

Except this one is full of discounts and sad, sad employees who grudgingly wear floppy Santa hats.

In The Village, one of Beijing’s most popular (and posh) shopping centers, a Smart Car and a Christmas tree are enclosed in a glass bubble. On the rim of the bubble, the message, “You could be the lucky winner of a brand new Smart Car!” is written in a happy, Christmas-y font. Ten meters away, at the entrance of UniQlo, a Japanese-owned clothing store, cutouts of Christmas hats and Santa Clauses block one’s view of the store’s interior. Inside the store, Christmas discounts abound (yay!) and foreigners are lined up, 10 or 20 at any given time, at the changing rooms or registers. Of course, there are Chinese people shopping too, but they are, I must say, the minority here.

And so, at first glance, there is a holiday fervor in the shopping area. But once one steps away from The Village, all of that dissipates, and one remembers that China is not a country in which holidays are celebrated in December. Chun Jie, the Spring Festival, isn’t until the end of January. On a second take of The Village’s Christmas trees and decorations, I couldn’t help but notice that while foreigners were walking past the decorations with smiles on their faces, the Chinese patrons walked by slowly, staring at the decorations,

Christmas decorations in The Village

as if they were looking at something that wasn’t their own, in a place that didn’t belong to them, in the midst of a celebration of which they were not a part.

On seeing this disconnect, I realized that I really don’t like the holiday season in China. I like China’s holiday seasons. I really loved it when every single store and home put out a Chinese flag during National Day. And I loved it when all of the small stores sold moon cakes during the Moon Festival. But Christmas? (Hanukkah is way beyond the capacity of these international corporate designs.) I don’t like it. Not one bit! And I especially don’t like it when Chinese employees are made to wear Santa hats!!!! Do they have a choice? In the States, do all employees have to abide by their companies’ costume policies?

I’d rather not have a commercial holiday season at all. Just knowing that Hanukkah

Cooking latkes at Maria's

 is going on right now is good enough for me. I don’t have a menorah, but I did make latkes!!! Tonight, at Maria’s, most of my friends got together for a holiday party, at which I made latkes from SCRATCH. We also ate salad, Swedish pancakes (American crepes), fruit with melted chocolate, and Danish sweets. The meal was 1/4 dinner fare and 3/4 dessert. It was amazing.

OK – so that’s the one thing – LATKES. I can’t do without them during the holiday season.

My very own latkes!

At the south gate before departing (everyone sans Maria)

During my trip to Xi’an last week, I promised myself that I would write down every minute of it for all to see and enjoy. Now, seven days later and with a load of new memories under my belt, I am reluctant to write down everything. I’ve just copied Maria and Johnny’s pictures to my computer and found some really funny and illustrative photos, plus I have a lot of my own that I’d like to feature here. So, I think it’s best to describe my trip mostly through the photos that I think capture the essence of our 36 hours in a small, yet crowded and bustling city twelve hours southwest of Beijing.

Heading onto the train

Though we went to Xi’an during the second-busiest holiday during the year (the first being the Chinese New Year), we managed to get tickets on one of the night trains. There are five types of tickets for each train: soft sleeper, hard sleeper, soft seat, hard seat, standing ticket. Ideally, we would have liked to have soft sleepers for the twelve-hour trip – you get your own bed and cabin – but we only managed to get soft seat tickets. Third best, I guess. Going there, the train was fairly empty, so we each found two seats to lay across. Sleep was tenuous though, as the sounds of snacking passengers and interminably long Chinese ballads pervaded the car.

Catching some sleep

Johnny, a photography aesthete, found himself working the nocturnal shift and decided to take pictures of all of us mid-sleep.

We went straight to the hotel after arriving in Xi’an, but first had to walk through the bustling train station, where we were surprised to find several people screaming “bing ma yong!” in our faces. Bing ma yong, or the terracotta army – one of China’s most famous tourist sites, second only to the Great Wall – is literally an army of clay soldiers that was dug up by archaelogists in the 1970s (well, discovered by laborers building a highway, one of whom sells his autograph at the main site).

Train station grounds

The army was built in 200 BC (-ish) to protect the tomb of Qin Shihuang, the emperor who, as it turns out, was the first to charter the building of the Great Wall during the Qin dynasty. Anyway, the buses that go to the site, around an hour away from Xi’an, are located right outside the train station, and hawkers will stop at almost nothing to get you on their tour buses, which are priced over 100 rmb more than the city’s bus, which costs a pleasant 7 rmb.

Johnny had booked the hotel online, haphazardly choosing the only one that wasn’t already full. The empty hotel is usually the one that you don’t want to go to, but we actually found ourselves in luck when we realized that the only cost of buying the cheaper chicken was that we had to walk through a filth-laden street to get to our destination.

posing in the hotel room

 The hotel was located on a small street full of wholesale vendors and garbarge. After a brutal beating of our olfactory senses, we hit upon a fairly nice hotel; the rooms had individual bathrooms and only cost us 50 rmb/night.

Because we only had 36 hours to travel around Xi’an (there were no tickets left for a return three days later, and we didn’t want to stay for four), we headed out that day to bing ma yong and later to a very famous Muslim market, where one can buy wares and baubles from the Hui Chinese, a group of Muslim Chinese who represent one of many minority groups in China.

The Terracotta Soldiers

Kabobs at the Market

Walking through the market is certainly my favorite memory from Xi’an. While the avenues were as crowded as those in markets in Beijing, the energy was calmer. I didn’t come across clawing vendors or animal cruelty (I really just hate the rabbits in the little box cages). The setting, though, really made me catch my breath.

The Drum Tower

A view of the market from the top of the Drum Tower

 The market is located directly under the Drum Tower, which is lit up at night and shines over the entire market, shedding a gold and red light on all of the small tables and their wares. Once you walk through the maze of streets and alleys, you find yourself back at the Tower, where tourists and locals alike mill around eating food and buying postcards. The night ended with a few beers at an outside stand, where all was well except for the drunkard at the table to our left, who made a point to chew rice and then spit it back into his bowl, one mouthful at a time.

Our second and final day was spent climbing the Wild Goose Pagoda (I may have forgotten to mention that Xi’an was the eastern terminus for the Silk Road, which brought Buddhism to China. The pagoda is famous for the massive translations that went on in there, specifically the translating of Buddhist texts from Hindi to Chinese in the year 652 AD.), walking through a beautiful park (and playing ping pong with some local experts), biking along the city wall, and taking the train back home. I’ll leave the rest of my story to my photos and those shot by Maria and Johnny.

The Wild Goose Pagoda and its tourists

"Lucky Buddha"

A wish

Playing at the playground

An American Apparel ad

Biking/resting on the wall

Xi'an train station right before our departure

People are getting hurt in Beijing and our teachers are worried about us. I’m having a hard time finding articles on it, but our teachers told us yesterday - yes, we had class on Sunday, had to make up for the nine-day vacation we’re about to have to celebrate the sixtieth – anyway, told us today that a few foreigners have died over the past two weeks and that we should be careful!

Wish I had the whole story, here is some of it. And here is some more. My friend, Johnny, told me that his teacher told him to get out of Beijing.

No worries, there are plenty of gigantic tanks with soldiers holding mammoth guns around…I feel safe enough.

Scare or no scare, people are ready to party. There’s a lot of nationalism going around, and even our teachers are showing pride.

Flags are hung outside of homes all over the city

Friday, our grammar teacher made up the sentence, “Wo jue de Mao Ze Dong liao bu qi. (I think that Mao Ze Dong is praiseworthy.)”

I want to update on the Great Wall and the hutongs, but I’m having a hard time writing about my touristy adventures. I’d rather post pictures of babies and Chinese flags. So, here are some photos from my recent walks around Beijing and on the Wall. (Really, I don’t want to show myself on the Wall because I was sweating like a sick cow in Saudi Arabia (it gets to 132 degrees in the summer there!).) There really is so much to say about both the hutongs and the Wall. I really enjoyed the feeling of being there – consummating my wish to see these thousand-year old (or more, or less…) structures that used to have real relevance and use for various dynasties over the past 2000 years. I must say, the Great Wall was inordinately, fascinatingly, breathtaking-ly, mindblowing-ly, distressingly, and unfathomably long.

The view from the top of a steep portion of the Wall

 It just curled and rose and twisted and extended forever (around 5,500 miles, actually).

Baby on the wall!

Interestingly, and maybe not so safe-ly, there were many children climbing the Wall. Bolette and I did the walk together and were stopped many a time for a picture with a baby. We also stopped just to play with some of the kids (and also to catch our breaths).

The touristy flavor was also really amusing. The hutongs had bookstores that featured both Obama’s works and Mao’s. Notebooks that featured sexual acts lined the bookshelves, but so did notebooks with images of Communist propaganda (commentary or what?) and ancient sayings. The Great Wall was magnificent, but clearly a mammoth structure that needs to be tended to at all times – workers were carrying a large piece of timber (I think) up a steep slope while we were there,

Laborers of a sort carrying a heavy block of metal up the wall

and we spotted six others laying down stone for a new addition to the easy walkway back down to the ticket area, where one can find a KFC and a Starbucks

waiting for your arrival. My friend, Mechal, happened to find a touristy spot in the form of a bear attraction. I have a video clip of him throwing apples to these bears; you can only see the bears if you take a roller coaster down from an area of the Wall to a random zoo.  The file is too big for the blog, but I’ll try to edit it and post it soon.

Apparently, everyone must touch the Wall when you reach one of the uppermost portions, so I have a bunch of pictures of me touching the Wall with Bolette, with Mei Mei, and with other friends. Many Chinese tourists also touched the Wall, and thought it would be fun for Bolette and me to take pictures with them touching the Wall, as well. I didn’t get any shots of this, but I did get one of a really happy family just after they touched!

Post-touch

Post-touch glory

There were many victorious moments on the Wall and it was really fun. But I think one visit is enough for this trip. Some people are thinking about going back to sleep on the Wall (yes, on it), but I was fine with my free two and a half hour excursion there.

Random note: In addition to my bout of heat exhaustion at the Wall, my computer has been working on overdrive, too. I had to delete a ridiculously new and angry Trojan off of my computer today (thank you CA anti-virus technicians) and do a system restore of my computer. So, I’m happy to say that my computer is up and running as well as it was on August 30th, 2009.