Happy Niu Year, part 1

Once again, the Chinese Spring Festival is upon us. Most Beijing residents who are from other cities in China have returned to their home towns, leaving the city oddly depopulated but far from quiet. As in the last two years, firework madness has taken hold of the city.

This is the Year of the Ox, and the word for ox (also cow and beef) is niu 牛, so we’re getting a little pun on some seasonal signs. There’s a beef and dairy company called Meng Niu (Meng here refers to Inner Mongolia, where they are based) which is especially using the slogan. (The Chinese phonetic spelling niu is actually pronounced nyo, like yo with an n tacked on the beginning of it, but it’s still close enough for a bilingual pun.)

One exception to the pattern of returning to hometowns is a friend of mine, and she very kindly invited me to New Year’s Eve dinner at her place. She and her mother, originally from the Shanghai area, live nearby and have not gone south for the holiday. They fixed a wonderful meal for me, the first time I’ve been invited into a Chinese home for a taste of non-restaurant food.
I was told that the tradition is to have ten dishes, which of course is way too much food for three people. Especially when one of them stays in the kitchen the whole time! Since their stove has only two burners, making ten dishes is more of a serial than a parallel process (to venture into computer metaphors). My friend’s mom kept cooking away (and I think I heard the sounds of cleaning as well) while we ate.

The picture was taken when eight dishes had been served. Shrimp, small whole crabs, roast beef, little pieces of ribs, chicken wings, a dish with squid and vegetables, and one with pork and vegetables are on the table along with a crock of soup. Still to come were broccoli and dumplings. And because in China too much is never enough, we also had some steamed buns with sweet fillings. We were so full we never even touched the soup.

With so many pieces of dishware being used to serve food, there was nothing left for us to eat off of, so we took food directly from the dishes with our chopsticks and put the shells and such on the table. Everything was quite tasty. I had to wonder about the predominance of meat. Was that for my benefit, special for the holiday, or what?

After dinner we watched the CCTV Spring Festival Gala on TV. There were a few times when I could tell what they were talking about, if not all the details. The two pandas recently given to Taiwan were mentioned a lot. I kept hearing their names, Tuan Tuan and Yuan Yuan. Finally the show got too corny for my friend and we decided to take a walk to work off dinner.
We entered a wasteland of fireworks debris.
As before, the pyromaniacs were out in force, openly displaying their obsession.
Across the street, we saw a big bunch of fireworks go off close to the ground. They looked like the kind of big colorful explosive things that are supposed to go off way up in the air. Soon flames leaped up from the shrubs next to the sidewalk. You can see a guy bringing a fire extinguisher. They soon had the fire out and went on with their fun.
A little further on our walk we came to the famous Gongti Xilu club area. There weren’t many people in the dance clubs, but the lights were going, competing with the fireworks going off around them. Along this street, there were fire extinguishers sitting about every ten meters or so along the sidewalk.

After we finished our circuit around Workers Stadium, we went back to their apartment and watched the rest of the Gala. I thought it was very interesting (especially after all the talk about the pandas sent to Taiwan) that the closing performance of the show, which started at about 12:30, was by a band (yes, and actual band, with guitars and drums) consisting of four famous Taiwanese singers from the 80s. My friend pointed out that when China started opening up to the outside world and discovering pop music, it had no music industry of its own, so most of the music came from Taiwan and Hong Kong. And since most Taiwanese pop was in Mandarin, as opposed to the Cantonese from Hong Kong, many of the songs from Taiwan are still well known today.

I am somewhat familiar with one of the singers, Luo Dayou (罗大佑 sometimes written Lo Ta-yu), and know that many of his songs have in the past been considered too politically outspoken for Mainland consumption. But the ones he sang for this Gala seemed to be well known to all the people in the audience.

I am sure that the Gala organizers were well aware of the symbolism of giving a Taiwanese artist such a place in the program (though honestly I think a lot of viewers switch off after midnight and might have missed it). And the performers are also aware of it, so it’s obviously a mutual agreement. Certainly these musicians could have declined the offer if they had problems with it.

Anyway, in my next post I’ll continue with more Spring Festival activities, and then catch up on some of what has gone in in the overly long time since my last post.

Olympic update: 169 days to go

We’ve just got word that in response to citizen protests in the outlying provinces of China, the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games have been cancelled. The protesters said the money should be spent on improving the lot of China’s people, and the government did an about face, essentially saying, “You know – you’re right.”

Just kidding. That’s about as likely as a Chinese New Year without fireworks.

And speaking of fireworks, today is Yuanxiaojie, or Lantern Festival, which marks the end of the Spring Festival that started with the Lunar New Year two weeks ago. The Lantern Festival falls on the first full moon of the new year, and is yet another occasion for lunatic pyromaniacal excess. With the added bonus of a golden orange full moon up above. I’d post more pictures, but I’m sure everyone is tired of them by now.

It is traditional on this day to eat a particular kind of dumpling called yuanxiao, but I went to the store a bit ago and they were all out. That’s what I get for staying at the office until almost seven. I’ll have to make do with something less traditional.

In actual Olympic news, they revealed a few weeks ago what the staff uniforms will look like.
The red ones are for staff, presumably ticketing staff included. I’m not sure why they bothered designing long sleeve versions, given the average temperature in August here. I presume these are what we’ll get, but nobody tells me anything. See also here.

And just as an aside, it seems the uniforms were presented as part of the “200 Days to Go” event. As you can see, it was quite a production.
I figure if they do something like this for every little arbitrary milestone, they’re bound to come up with something really spectacular (in the truest sense of the word) for the Opening Ceremonies, with or without prissy American consultants (if you take my meaning).

And here’s something I’ve been wanting to see for quite a while. It was inevitable, given how pervasive the mascots are. Fuwa parodies!
I came across these on a web site quite by accident. (None of the artists are credited.) There were a bunch more that I couldn’t recognize – probably Chinese celebrities. Now all we need is the Revolutionary Fuwa with Chinese Characteristics, featuring Mao, Deng, Hu, and whatever other two most fit the bill, which might be difficult because two of the mascots are supposed to be female. But that needn’t hold back a true artist. Other suggestions: Disney Fuwa, Beatle Fuwa, Looney Tunes Fuwa, Anne Geddes Baby Fuwa, Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (+1) Fuwa, Aardman (Wallace and Gromit) Fuwa, Muppet Fuwa, Hello Kitty Fuwa, Harry Potter Fuwa, Hentai Fuwa – the possibilities are endless. And let’s not forget the Famous Artists Series: Fuwa done in the style of Rembrandt, da Vinci, Bosch, Monet, Picasso, Warhol, Audubon, Pollack, Mapplethorpe... Come on, you Photoshop experts, get busy! (On further thought, forget I mentioned Hentai Fuwa.)

Maybe that last picture can’t really be called a parody, and is just one of the entries from an art contest for primary school kids.

You probably can’t tell from reading, but I just paused to watch a particularly cool bunch of fireworks going off across the street. A sparkling fairy-dust trail shot up into the sky in a tight spiral to a height of 12 stories or so, then exploded into a midair pinwheel throwing off sparks in a rapid circle. There was a whole series of them, maybe a dozen from the whole box. Cool.

And now for today’s Mandarin lesson. I was telling some of my Chinese coworkers about the huge crowd of people at Ditan Park on New Year’s Day, and I asked how you say crowded in Chinese. The answer is ren duo, which means literally people many. You say ren tai duo for too crowded (people too many).

Later on, one of them taught me another way to say it: ren shan ren hai. Word for word, this means people mountain people sea. I’m not sure exactly how such an expression might have developed, as it’s pretty telegraphic, like many Chinese expressions. There are some obvious (and probably wrong) possibilities: people from mountain to sea; or just the fact that both mountains and the sea are big; or maybe something like we use in English – a mountain of people, a sea of people.

In other, completely unrelated, news, today I booked a flight to Shanghai next week to see Björk. I’ve been a big fan for many years but never seen her live, so it seems like a chance I shouldn’t pass up. Once again I find myself revisiting a place I’ve been before rather than going somewhere new, but Shanghai gets the concerts, not Chengdu. It will be a quick trip; fly there the morning of the show, stay one night, back the next day. It’s awkwardly scheduled on a Sunday night, but mei banfa (nothing can be done).

It mostly seems like this “Spring” Festival is a bit premature. Consider the ice chair pictures a couple of posts back. But this week it’s warmed up to the point where I put the long underwear in the drawer instead of wearing them as drawers (sorry). Maybe spring is coming after all.

Deconstructing Beijing

Note: I wrote this on 17 February, but couldn’t get to the web site to post it. I was afraid my access to that had gone the way of my access to viewing it, but it seems to be back today.

And now for something more like my typical posts. Yesterday I walked a few blocks to a store I go to occasionally, and on the way back home I passed the construction site just over the fence from Season Park. I posted this picture a little while ago:
The view interested me enough that I hurried home, put away my groceries and ran back out with my camera. I really should just carry the thing with me all the time.

They've made a bit more progress since then, with the building on the left almost completely gone, and yesterday it looked like this.
At the right side you can see the same gate that was in the previous picture.

Here's another angle on it.
And I took a little video to post on YouTube.

Moving along from there, I came across a recycling truck that's been decorated for the Lunar New Year.
And along the street, where one year ago looked like this:
Now looks like this:
It will be interesting to see just what a "European Mansion" might be.

Skating into the new year

Shortly after I managed to roll out of bed this morning, I got an email from TG that he and SJ were going to check out Houhai and see what it was like on New Year’s Day. I had no plans, so I decided to join them.

We caught a taxi a little after noon and headed to one of the most popular entertainment districts in town, which strangely I’ve never visited before. When we got out of the taxi, the first thing we saw was how Beijingers make use of their lakes in the winter time.
This is Qianhai, one of a series of lakes west of the Forbidden City. It’s just north of Beihai, which I wrote about a while ago. They have chairs mounted on rails, and propel themselves with metal poles.
There are also ice skates for rent. I like the tricycles parked on the ice. Off in the distance, straight beyond the skate vendor in the chair, you can see that even the ice chairs can be tricky to control. That’s a woman down on the ice with a man helping her.
This part of town is highly commercialized, with old-style hutong buildings renovated into trendy restaurants and night clubs.
Here you can see one of the ice chairs better, as well as one of the other contraptions they rent, a pedal-powered ice cycle.
The north end of Qianhai turns into a little channel that connects to the next lake in the chain, Houhai. The banks of the channel are crowded with shops, restaurants and bars.
I saw these decorations in the window of one of the restaurants.
We came across these guys, who had just finished with a swim in Houhai.
From the end of the lake you can see all the way to the China World Trade Center Tower that’s being built.
I am going to have to come back to this place when it’s warmer. You’ve got Aladdin, Nilotic Monkey, and the Water Nymph Café, and some nifty Egyptian style decorations.
And here are the namesakes for the little island in the background, Wild Duck Island.

After completing our circuit of Qianhai and Houhai, we found a taxi to take us to Ditan Park, which held the big festival I visited last year. SJ is heading back to the US tomorrow, so I suggested it as a good place to get a real look at China celebrating their biggest holiday.

For the most part, it looked very similar to last year, so you can just go back to the old post for pictures. This time we arrived earlier in the day than last year, so there were a few things I missed last time round.
Like people burning incense at an old religious site. Ditan was the Temple of Earth opposite the more famous Temple of Heaven. There are also temples of the Sun and Moon to complete the four sides.
We were in time to catch some of the entertainment. This group played traditional instruments along with an electronic backing track. And to be honest, they could have been playing along with the whole arrangement for all I could tell.
And here’s a little emperor being conveyed around by his loyal servants.

I took this standing at the intersection of two major paths in the park.

That made for a pretty tiring day, so I came home and threw some veggies in a pot with water and chicken bouillon to make a soup. I watched a bit of the CCTV Gala rerun and started organizing the day’s pictures.

This notice in my building’s lobby is how the management office greeted us for the holiday:

All Occupants/Residents
Spring Festival is approaching, our property department officer send our best wishes to you!
Spring Festival period, strengthens the safe guard work, asks you to come in and out of the building on own initiative to carry access card. Regarding the visit visitor, like is unable to determine the concrete room number, the great hall security temporarily does not give the gate and informs the property department to carry on the inquiry, the relation. Holiday period like you egress, please close, the windows and doors, the engineering department can help you to closes the electric circuit, the closure water supply pipe valve, please leave your urgent telephone at the property department.
The weather in Beijing is dry and windy, so it is very easy for the plants in and around our mansion to catch fire if they meet spark. To ensure our owners/residents have a neat and safe living environment, our management office kindly advise you not to ignite firecracker when you celebrate the Spring Festival with you family. You can ignite firecracker at designated locations outside the south gate of the east gate.
Thanks for your cooperation
Wish you to have a happy and healthy holidays!

I’m guessing this was translated from the Chinese original by Google.

Unsafe and insane

Words just cannot capture the scene in Beijing for the Chinese New Year. So this time I took some videos and posted them on Youtube to give you an idea what it’s like.

The first one is right at the entrance to Seasons Park a few minutes before midnight, pretty close to the height of the madness.

The second one is about 20 minutes later. It’s a quick video panning across the area I could see right then.

I’ve got more, but I need to edit them down a bit – the files are too big for Youtube.

Further evidence

By yesterday, many offices were closed for Chunjie (Spring Festival), though our office was officially open until today. As with many other holidays, most of our staff, including the Americans, worked on Saturday and Sunday, basically trading those two days to have extra days off after the New Year. So the next regular work day is not until 13 February, though we have so many deadlines in the near future that most of the expats will be working most of the days, whether in the office or from our apartments.

Anyway, all that is just an introduction to this picture:
This is an office that shares the fifth floor with us. The company name, Juto (or jutou in proper pinyin), means Gigantic Head. I don’t really know anything about them, but it’s a great name for a media company. I hope they’re as cool as their name.

Are those mice or rats?

Okay, maybe I’m obsessing over the whole rat/mouse thing. I promise to stop. Unless I find any really interesting examples to share.

The other night I was invited out to dinner by one of the workers in the Olympic Committee’s ticketing office. He took me to a place that he used to go to a lot but hasn’t visited in a few years. It’s one of the restaurants along the famous Gui Jie (Ghost Street) which is between the office and Seasons Park. It’s a rather unassuming place that is known for this dish (the one on the right):
Spicy shrimp. Really spicy shrimp. They’re cooked whole in enough hot peppers to kill a whole colony of rats (oops!) along with whole cloves of garlic and a bunch of Sichuan pepper (huajiao or flower pepper). It was pretty tasty, with the only problem being the miniscule amount of meat on each shrimp. But those are the biggest they can get this time of year. I’m told that for the same price in the summer time you get the same number of shrimp, only they’re a lot larger. They give you plastic gloves to wear so you can pick the shrimp up and peel them without getting the sauce on your hands. If you happened to rub your eyes with traces of that stuff on your fingers, I bet you’d be in serious pain.

We also had a selection of cold vegetables with a dipping sauce (more or less the same sauce as you usually get with duck). Later on a crock of “special” tofu (doufu in Chinese) showed up, and later still, a big fish cooked in the same basic style as the shrimp. Mmm, my mouth is watering now from the memory. Good stuff, though not for the faint-tongued.
Yes, it’s another random shot of construction in Beijing. The tall buildings behind on the right side are Seasons Park. Notice the old restaurant front that they left intact. There’s actually still glass in those windows. Last summer and fall, that restaurant (which hasn’t been open since I moved here) housed a bunch of squatters and reeked most unpleasantly. It’s kind of nice that they left the old gateway standing. I’m pretty sure it will be more apartments going up here. This construction site is the noisiest one around nowadays, with crashing, crunching grinding and banging from early in the morning till late at night every day. I’m hoping it’ll quiet down a little for Chunjie, though if it does, I’m sure the fireworks will make up for the noise.

Mice in lights

As I was walking home from the office tonight (it was only just below freezing, and I can use a little exercise), I saw lots of Lunar New Year decorations. I was walking past a shopping/office/apartment complex called East Gate Plaza (“Rest easy, play hard at East Gate Plaza” – there’s also a bowling alley and a multiplex cinema that shows movies in English) when I saw a woman ahead of me stop and get out her camera. When I got a little closer, I saw what she was aiming at.
From a little further along, you can see more of the design in the back.
A few weeks ago, reindeer were pulling Santa’s sleigh in the place where the mice now romp.

And for comparison, here’s a picture of what this same location looked like back in September:
We call this sculpture/fountain thing Doc Oc.

The mice are taking over

It’s quite apparent when going anywhere in Beijing that the Chinese New Year, also known as the Lunar New Year or the Spring Festival, is coming up soon. The basic decoration strategy seems to be to leave up the Christmas decorations and add Chinese symbols into the mix. So Santa and the reindeer and the sparkly trees are still hanging around, and the good luck characters and mice have been added. The upcoming year is generally called the Year of the Rat, but as it happens, Mandarin doesn’t really distinguish between rats and mice (laoshu or haozi for both), and mice are cuter, so from the looks of things, it will be the Year of the Mouse.

Last night we had our company New Year’s party. I’ve looked back through last year’s blog posts, and it seems I didn’t really say much about that party. Well, we were a much smaller company then, and it was a pretty minimal affair. We took an afternoon off and walked to a nearby party facility, where we had a meal and some karaoke.

This year’s party was bigger in all respects. I think the planning committee had some difficulties, because the event was rescheduled twice from other days due to the unavailability of any decent facilities. So we ended up on a Sunday late afternoon at The Sixth Club. It’s one of thousands of party venues around town. And remember that in a city this big, saying “thousands” is not an exaggeration. It’s a whole industry that hardly exists in American cities.

TG, SJ, and I ended up being the last ones to arrive, and everyone else was already eating and drinking when we walked in. We found some seats and hit the buffet. It was decent if not outstanding, with the roast duck being the standout. No surprise, this being Beijing and all.
Each table was labeled with a famous mouse character.
I’ve been trying to get over a nasty cold for a couple weeks now, so I only had a few sips of beer, but some of my coworkers were having a great time with their beverages. No embarrassing breaches of etiquette I’m happy to report.
People were encouraged to participate in the festivities, and somehow TG and I got talked into take part. RR was supposed to join us, but he was stuck back at the office all evening and didn’t make it. There were several karaoke performances, one of which was preceded by some sort of skit that I didn’t understand at all, but got lots of laughs.
And we had a dance routine, complete with costumes.
There were a number of games, including this one that I never caught the rules to. The men sat in the chairs with baby bibs, and the women bonked them on the heads from time to time. I think it was part “Simon Says” with some strange domestic overtones. There was a second part where the women gave the men baby bottles full of beer and the winner was the one to suck it down fastest.
There was also a round of Musical Chairs and a Three-People-Four-Legs race that nearly resulted in serious injuries.
I am seriously out of order here, but what the heck. TG and I took the stage for a painful take on “Hotel California” with lyrics I rewrote to fit our company, full of in-jokes and Olympic references. I called it “Hotel 2008” (“Hotel Er-Ling-Ling-Ba”). It got off to kind of a slow start, but once someone stuck a mic in JW’s face and got him to sing, it improved a lot.

There were some very nice prize drawings, including a Wii and a digital camera and a bunch of portable game systems and iPods. I didn’t win anything.

At least not in the drawings. TG and I got an award for The Best Courage for our performance. Which translates as being really bad but sticking it out to the end, I suppose. There were also two other trophies, one for the dancers and one for the IT department for the skit and song. And everyone got a big stuffed mouse to take home.
Now, I suppose all of this might sound kind of silly. It’s definitely different from any office parties I’ve been to over the last ten years in the US. I hope I’m not inadvertently echoing some kind of stereotype, but what it comes down to is the fact that my colleagues here are not as cynical and jaded as most Americans. Most of us hate to participate in silly games, hate to risk looking foolish, and would rather stay home than play Musical Chairs. But as far as I could tell, everyone had a great time. Perhaps the lure of prizes and the free-flowing beer helped, but for each game, there were people eager to play. Our modern “sophistication” seems to come with a price: we can’t relax and act like kids for a few hours with our coworkers.