A Few Quirks of Life in China

After some thought, I've decided to start a mini-blog segment devoted to sharing some of the smaller idiosyncrasies of life here: the things that I carelessly let fall through the cracks because at the time I was too overwhelmed with singing mushrooms or haggling for amazing kitchenware or backpacking through Laos, Thailand or Cambodia. Now that our number of remaining days in China have dropped into the double digit range, I thought it was time for some serious "China-quirk blog cramming." After all, it's now or never.

left to right: rabbits in cages, three bowls turtles, one bowl ?, one styrofoam crate of fish

 
#36 Turtles in a Mixing Bowl: pet or lunch?

I'm getting mixed messages. The first time I came across this street display I was emerging from a subway stop on my way to IKEA. I saw the turtles swimming around in their bowl and then my eyes traveled to the fluffy baseball-sized Floppsy, Mopsy and Cottontails nestled in stacked cages just beside them.

My first reaction was the joyful elation of any warm-hearted child who in the first moments of laying eyes on a fluffy friend can offer no resistance to the overpowering, pre-programmed desire to a) hold it! b) take it home, where it will inevitably c) grow old with me and be my best friend for life. I estimate that this process takes about three seconds (including visualizations) and only ends for adult-children when d) I'm adult and I know better [than to buy animals on the street in China], I can't possibly care for this animal, must regain pre-animal sighting composure mode kicks in.

But then I got scared.

Another, smaller display. Turtles in bowl on left, rabbits on the right

This is China. They eat everything here. Wait a minute...are these animals friends or table toppers? After months of agonizing over this completely unnecessarily, I'm choosing to believe that the answer is friends. That's what everyone seems to try to sell me on anyway, and they have no idea I already had a name picked out for my rabbit.

#61 Whatcha' Readin?

On the subway, if you are reading a book plan on sharing it. Pull an English title from your bag and you're sure to make some new friends fast. They won't talk to you, but they will read over your shoulder. And they don't stop when you look at them when a face that says, "what are you doing?" They just stare back at you and wait for you to turn the page so they can hunker down next to you for more pairs reading. The same rule applies to text messages and emails.

# 14 Pea Popsicles

Please note the sunglasses

 These delectable/horrendous frozen treats have been a point of conflict here between my spouse and me.  He thinks they're disgusting. I think they're amazing. Yes, they are made with peas, but I don't think they taste like peas. As a rule, I'm not very fond of peas. I eat them, but they're not my favorite; so I don't think this is a factor. It's just a tasty popsicle. The wrapper is also fabulous. Couldn't find that in America.

That's all for today, but there will be more later.

Beijing: Featuring...The Great Wall of China

When I left off last time we had just gone to meet up with the Jacksons. Unfortunately, we forgot to take a picture together so I'm going to cheat and use another picture from a different visit.

On Sunday morning we woke up and had a delicious homemade breakfast with Gary and Danita before we went with them to visit their service. We really enjoyed meeting their friends and visiting with everyone at lunch afterward. We felt so warmly received. From there we went out to see the sights. Stop one was the Temple of Heaven.

Temple of Heaven

This is the temple where the Emperor would make sacrifices to the gods to ensure a good harvest.  It's in the middle of a huge park that had lots of beautiful flowering trees and bushes that were just starting to bloom. Beijing is a beautiful city.

A little Chinese Spring

Next we hit the Olympic Park.  It was fun to see the Bird's Nest in person. I would like to have seen the structures lit up at night, but we didn't feel like waiting, so we snapped a few pictures and headed on our merry way.

I had to hold my fleece behind the camera so we could open our eyes. It was very bright!

Aquatics Center.  goggles, obviously.

Since making the decision to move to Shanghai for a year we knew that we wouldn't be able to come back home without a trip to the Great Wall. How could we face our families? It would be humiliating.  So we reserved our last day in Beijing for our Great Wall hike. Nothing was on our agenda but climbing all those stairs and marveling at this monster of stone climbing the countryside.

One thing I did not anticipate was the absolute terror that came over me as I continued to climb higher and higher up the steps.  Yep, you heard me, I was petrified. You don't realize it before you're on it but those walls are very low, I assure you, you could fall right over the edge.

At times the steps are quite steep. We had our backpacks on because we were headed home when we left the wall, so the mix of feeling a little off balance, the tornado-force winds and being an overall scardey-cat made me more than a little anxious. Ok, I confess- there was some minor hyperventilating on my part, and yes I clutched those rails at every possible opportunity, but I made it.

The climb down, which I was thinking would be easy, was actually the trickiest part because of 1) our backpacks and 2) the crazy youths that were playing some sort of the Fast and the Furious game on foot, knocking over innocent bystanders as they ran all over the Wall in a frenzy.  This old lady would have shaken her fist at them if I'd been able to spare one from my death grips on the knee-height rail and Joel's hand, respectively.  I said everything I needed to say with my eyes. Miscreants.

Despite being fully convinced of my eminent death, I managed to have a delightful time. The views were beautiful everywhere you turned. Even in the winter before the grass and trees had all woken up it was a lovely thing to see the wall stretching and meandering across the horizon.

We gave the whole Beijing experience a big two thumbs up. Fun parting aside: You may remember from a previous post that we have been assigned minor celebrity status on occasion in Shanghai, but it's rare. It came as a surprise but in Beijing, we were quite a spectacle. It was a common to see people grab for their cell phones and take pictures of us or with us if they were bold enough to ask. It happened too many times to count: in Tienanmen, on the subway, in the Forbidden City, on the Wall, at local eateries for lunch, they couldn't get enough...and all I could think to myself was didn't you host the Olympics? Shouldn't you be over this by now? Not that I minded, of course.  The population everyone is worried about taking over the world get excited and sheepish when they run into me on the street. I think it's precious. 

Beijing Trip: Forbidden City

I truly make an effort to be a culturally sensitive person.  I always try to be polite when dealing with things that are foreign to me, even when I dislike them. Daily instances: being shoved, being cut in line, having a huge loogey spit on the sidewalk right where you were about to walk. I try to make allowances.

I say this in the hope that you'll forgive me because I'm sure that what I'm about to say is very rude.

The source of my rudeness: Tomb Sweeping Holiday.  Catchy name, am I right?

The tradition is what really gets me though. You go and eat lunch, preferably picnic style, at [read:with] the graves of your ancestors. And then you clean them. You actually clean the tombs. That's the holiday.

Why this one thing sticks out to me as absurd when any number of not normal things have worked themselves into my new-normal routine is beyond my grasp right now, but I mention it because it brought us to Beijing. That's right, Tomb Sweeping Holiday is four day weekend. (I guess that's how long it takes to finish sweeping all the tombs?)

So I had a lot of firsts.

First time to take the train in China. 

Shiny

First time to show up at the wrong train station and have to run through the station to exchange/buy new tickets fifteen minutes before the train departed. If you are thinking, idiots, who shows up at the wrong train station? Didn't they check? I say to you: I always check! I just, this once, had a tiny, um, mishap brought about by the fact that I can't read Chinese characters.

First time in the super nice sleeping cars! [=mistake rewarded]

There were built in TVs at the foot of each bed. We had the top bunks.

First time to visit the Forbidden City.

For Luck

Reflections

It was both bigger and smaller than I had anticipated.

Bigger in the sense that everything was very spread out and thus occupied a vast amount of space as a whole. Smaller in the sense that it was less grand than I had pictured.

But it was still amazing.

This slight disappointment I own completely to the fact that I had been reading too much historical fiction about the Forbidden City in the height of it's glory in the months leading up to our visit (misplaced modifier-the reading was in the months before the visit, not the glory).

Ceramics

It would have been much cooler had it been full of emperors and concubines all shuffling about in their ostentatious silken outfits delicately plotting each others murders in the shadows of their immaculately kept rock gardens. I wanted to see the parade of a hundred dishes coming to the Empress' pavilion for her nightly dinner. I pictured it being like the "Be Our Guest" scene from Beauty and the Beast, only with the added benefit of being sinister and Chinese.

 

Tourists are considerably less interesting. Oh well, I have only myself to blame. Antiquity aside, it really was a lovely place to visit, and our geeky audioguides that we rented gave enough snipits of palace intrigue to keep me appeased.

These guys were everywhere. My audioguide probably told me about them, but I forgot.

We spent a few hours visiting all the palaces inside before heading across the street to visit Tienanmen Square.  Since Mao wasn't accepting visitors in the afternoon we just snapped a few pictures and left to go and meet our delightful hosts, the Jacksons and go out for a fabulous dinner of Peking Duck.

Our volunteer photographer insisted on crouching down on his knees to get the maximum possible up angle that the Chinese love for pictures and Americans hate because of the inevitable "fat face." After the overnight train ride and no small number of hours sightseeing around the city, we weren't in a frame of mind to care.

I'll save the Temple of Heaven and the Great Wall for next time.