I am STANDING in A TIMELESS dream of light

So it's been about a month since I last wrote, which is pretty shameful really. My excuse is that life has been too busy and fun to spend time writing about it! I do have a few updates to fill you in on though if there is anyone still interested in my life out here.

I quite often wonder how on earth such strange things happen to me in Beijing. The answer is of course that it is china, and it would be more strange if I managed to avoid having experiences like this but still, sometimes my life feels very bizarre. Here are three examples from recent weeks:

Beijing university foreign language students competition

A compulsory part of our course here is to compete with all the other language classes of foreign students. We had to create some kind of presentation of around ten minutes on anything we like provided it was all in Chinese, and touched on something cultural for some country.
The whole competition lasted around four days, had varying degrees of difficulty and actually was taken pretty seriously by the other classes. We aren't in a normal stream like everyone else who is assigned according to test results and so on, but our little Cambridge class was also involved.
So one Thursday afternoon I spent five hours in a massive auditorium mostly surrounded by enthusiastic Koreans (most of the higher level students are Korean or Japanese) with banners and elaborate costumes, watching dance routines, plays, poetry recitals and chants in Chinese.
I also had to perform in a 'British version of take me out', where we each played stereotypes and humiliated ourselves. Laurence and Sam did a great job with some pre-filmed video clips and in the end we came second which won us a small box of Chinese chocolates.
So while all my peers are preparing to graduate and hand in their dissertations, find a job in the real world and so on, that I was having to devote my time to compulsory public embarrassment of the kind which hasn't been forced on me since primary school felt somewhat ridiculous. It also felt very China, no way would it be acceptable in Britain to force all the foreign language students to perform like dancing monkeys for the native speakers, let alone required.

Television theme song recording

The week after the competition, my course coordinator asked me if I would help sing a Chinese song with some other foreign students, and to meet her at one after class. My classmate Bex and I obliged, knowing only this information.
Upon arrival we were told to get on a minibus.
When I asked why, she told me it was to get to the recording studio.
I asked why we needed to go there- to record the theme song. What theme song? For the tv show.
What tv show? A foreigners in china X factor of sorts which would be airing on the Chinese equivalent of the BBC (CCTV).
How long will this take, I have just had three exams and I wanted to rest this afternoon? The whole day, but could be done faster if we sing it well.
What song are we singing? Didn't I send it to you yesterday? All the other students have been given a demo and lyrics to practice, did you not get it?
....
No. I did not get it.
Next thing I knew we were being carted off with about six other internationals to the east side of town with, one of which was an infuriating French Canadian girl in a full length kimono and fishnets who sang Chinese songs at the top of her lungs the whole way. She gave the impression of being something like a cross between a children's television presenter, a teacher's pet and a Whitney Huston-esque diva.
We arrived at a children's primary school, walked in and up a dirty staircase with blue paint peeling on the walls. The next flight of stairs was framed by an elaborate Chinese graven doorframe with a mat of fake grass at the front. We entered it and proceeded to climb. The next floor had a big wooden sign saying 'happy bee art'. We continued our climb and arrived at... A professional recording studio with several different rooms, a bar selling cocktails, a cafe, a pool table. Then a soundproof area with all the equipment set up and a large group of Chinese staff. Not what you expect to find within a primary school that from the outside seemed just like every other I've seen here.
I had to rapid learn the song, which was one of the most annoying things I've ever heard. It tried to incorporate every Chinese cliche possible, literary illusions, tongue twisters and patriotic lines such as 'no matter whether you are year of the dog, horse, snake or dragon, we all love China!'
We were filmed pretending to sing the song and then actually recorded it properly afterwards. Our pretend singing was helpfully inspired by the director telling us: 'remember -acting.' And then waving his arms in the air behind the cameraman. I don't know whether he wanted us to wave too, or look up, or he was just getting into it. The result was us doing a very good impression of acting confused and awkward.
So I guess I will be hearing myself declaring my love for all things Chinese on a tv screen soon...

Encounter with the police

The bizarre experience of this weekend was not so amusing or light hearted, and actually highlighted a lot of very sad things about the community I am living in now. I was having breakfast in a cafe down my road in the morning with a couple friends on Sunday, there was just the three of us and then two staff on duty, both young Chinese girls. Three African guys came into the restaurant, still drunk from the night before and not having slept yet.
One of them came up to our table and tried to flirt with us and sit down. The waitress who I am friends with came up and asked if we knew him, we said we didn't and she directed him to sit at a different table. He then slapped her across the face and moved to continue hitting her.
We jumped up to protect her, my friend went to her and I held him back and tried to drag him to the door, and told him to leave. He refused and started being physically aggressive to me as well.
While the waitresses hid behind the counter and I was trying to keep him away my friend ran out to the small police station directly outside the restaurant to ask for help. They continued to eat their dumplings and without looking up told her to dial the main office, it wasn't their business. His two friends who were all about his height and strength didn't do anything either for a very long time, then eventually held him in the hallway outside the restaurant.
By the time the police arrived the guy had already got away. My friend and I, the two African guys and the waitress were all taken to the police station for questioning, which was really unprofessional and fruitless because his friends claimed to know absolutely to hint about him aside from a nickname and were still drunk or under the influence of some other substance.
It was all very depressing, seeing how no one would help five girls who were being attacked in broad daylight, even the police. That a foreigner would come into a restaurant and attack a waitress completely unprovoked and totally defenceless physically and socially, then us as well and get away with it while his friends watched. Then that justice wasn't done by the police questioning.
I didn't expect to encounter that while I was having granola in a cafe, and it made me really sad. Definitely not the kind of unusual I enjoy encountering.

The characteristics of a Beijing Spring

The sky is raining cotton buds. I'm not joking, it looks like snow but actually they are just little clusters of fluff, each about the size of a coin. I'm cycling around trying to bat the cotton out of my face so that I can see and not inhale it. My friend Bethany aptly described the feeling as having invisible sheep in her eyes, it is very surreal. As I write this they are falling into my drink, inconvenient.
We had tomb sweeping festival holiday a couple weeks ago which in the past meant that people went and swept the tombs of their ancestors. However now china has too many people for anyone to be buried in tombs, almost everyone is cremated now and remains are stored in big official buildings. So that tradition has become gradually less significant through necessity. Instead the holiday is spent enjoying another Chinese tradition which is called 'stepping on green'.
It really is just stepping on green, green being grass. So lots of Chinese people go to the mountains or to parks or to some place a bit closer to nature than the metropolis we live in and take photos of themselves standing on green things, with budding blossoms, or just of flowers up close. I've found that appreciating spring and autumn is done a lot more purposefully than in the west, people decide that they will go out and look at the changing leaves or the new blossoms, and it is an activity in itself not something you do in passing. We would maybe take a walk and see the flowers, but Chinese take a walk to see the flowers, and document themselves standing beside them, often in traditional dress.
The temperature has gone from me still needing a hot water bottle at night and thermals to me currently sitting outside in a rooftop cafe tanning in shorts and a t-shirt. Everyone always told me that Beijing doesn't really do autumn or spring, the temperature rockets up without warning and then stops at either unbearable heat or cold, we are in the precious time of comfortable heat and I am savouring every moment.
Also, Beijing is suddenly beautiful. I had forgotten how many trees there were and flower bushes, colour makes such a difference to everything. And we either have polluted days where everything is grey, or bright blue sky with no cloud. So on the bright blue days it really is stunning.

Conscience now grinding soy bean milk fritters

It's been a long time since I've written for lots of great reasons, the main one being that my parents came to visit and there have been lots of guests around. I'm getting a pro at how to get non Chinese speakers to the big sights in Beijing and feeling very local. I am actually writing this entry at the arrivals gate!

News from the past few weeks

Politics
-Xi Jinping is officially in power now with a landslide victory, only one vote in opposition, four abstentions and four votes that seem to have not been counted?
-What this has meant for my life is that again, Internet has been extremely slow and none of the precious vpns were working so limited Facebook access.
-Lots of old people are sitting around with red armbands saying things like 'local protection squad'. As far as I can see this just gives lots of old women to stand around doing what they always did (very little) but look more like they are meant to be there.
-A lot more police around all over the place making trouble. I was in Nian cafe (the one run by some of the art students from the forestry university that I'm friends with) a couple weeks ago when a policeman came in asking lots of mundane questions very aggressively to the five of us in the tiny cafe (where do you study? Do you come here often? Do you like this cafe?? Do cafes in England need licences?!). I think he was angry because he thought they didn't have a licence to operate or something. I'm not sure if they do or not to be honest, but it is only because of the government meetings that anyone cared at all. I think it's all been resolved now, the guys were very chilled about it.

Local news
-In my apartment block they have added a really irritating swipe card system which means that the sleepy looking 'security guards' (they are wearing us army surplus clothes, I think this might give you some indication of their professionalism) now have to swipe everyone in instead of their previous job which was sitting by the gate with a cone in front of it, and moving the cone when a car wanted to get in. They go through phases of being too lazy to open the gate and then they just put the cone back again.
-I found out that beneath the massive apartment complex next to the one I live in there are six floors underground where all the migrant workers who work in nearby shops and buildings live. I had no idea, although it makes a lot of sense because housing is expensive in the student area so there is no way most of the people that staff it could afford to live there when the average waiter gets paid 70-80 pence an hour.

And now we turn to the weather...
-Since I have come back we have had two sandstorms, it's snowed twice, and the weather has been nice enough not to need a coat. Sandstorms are difficult to cycle in because you keep inhaling dust, it gets in your eyes and the wind makes the direction of your bike hard to control. I don't recommend it.
-Yesterday the government turned the Beijing central heating off for the first time since November, so the winter is officially over- unfortunately today it snowed.
-The pollution has been terrible almost all the time with a few days of clear skies. Everyone is really angry and stressed about the pollution, Chinese and westerners are all wearing much more intense World War Two blitz style looking masks and the government is getting a lot of negative attention for it. I don't know if the news story about the 6000 dead pigs turning up in the river in Shanghai reached you or not but
that's also caused a big stir. One Chinese blogger has joked that China is so prosperous that in Beijing you can smoke for free and in Shanghai water is now pork soup which I enjoyed!

Cultural feature piece- how to spot a (south)Korean person or Korean owned establishment

Some background:
My area of town has three distinct groups, Chinese, Korean and all other foreigners. The reason that the Koreans are their own group is because there are so many more of them than all other international students and they have their own very separate social networks. In terms of dress sense and general coolness, I would rank Chinese at the bottom, then foreigners and then Koreans at the top by a long way. This may sound strange to you but I don't think I know anyone here of any category that would dispute this ranking.
The typical Korean student will be
Wearing hipster classes (frames are optional)
Leggings of some variety, guys often wear a cross between sports trackies, leggings and skinny jeans
Some really nicely made University logo sports jacket with their subject written on the back (somehow the Korean networks make these for themselves and you can't buy them, I've asked one once)
A baseball cap (guys not girls)
Perfectly turned out with makeup on and flawless skin. Even the guys wear makeup sometimes, not in a drag queen way but to accentuate their features.
Girls are often very slim and elegant with loose fitting long tops or baggy jumpers on which emphasise their great figure.
Riding an immaculately clean, powerful scooter or motorbike. Chinese ones (and my one) are really dusty because Beijing is dry and dusty but somehow the Korean ones are always spotless. I parked next to a restaurant and instantly knew large group of Koreans were inside just from the vehicles parked outside.
All their electronics are Samsung.
If none of the above are true, you can tell that they are Korean because they will be wearing an outfit with clothes that a westerner is unlikely to think of combining but that on them seems to look really good and well matched.

Korean establishments
-Sell great coffee- Chinese people don't normally drink caffeinated things because its bad for your qi, so all coffee shops tend to be western or Korean.
-
Have really stylish interiors that are quirky and cool- Maan coffee for example has massive trees inside it with lanterns and chandeliers hanging off it. When you place an order they give you a teddy bear ( in the winter they are wearing knitted jumpers) which is traded for your drink or waffles when they arrive. The toilets are clean, have scented candles by the sinks and aren't squat toilets like every other place. In another one called Coffee Bean Tree the menu covers are made of little knitted quilts.

In conclusion, Psy aside you can probably see why a Korean wave has hit Asia and that I have also fallen under the spell! If you can't watch the music videos for some Korean girl and boy bands, it's mesmerising.

The most organised used book store in town

SUMMARY

• I ate a whole meal served to me on a banana leaf and with only my right hand in Penang's little India. You would think the primativeness would make this easier to do than using utensils but in fact it was really hard! Anna and I were discussing whether we could open this type of restaurant in the UK but got stuck when we arrived at the problem of how to obtain fresh banana tree leaves.
• Had pancake day in Singapore, and really confused boarder control by crossing over to Thailand for the afternoon only to buy a coconut.
• Had a spontaneous road trip to the Thai boarder and listened mostly to Australian hip hop which I was not well acquainted with beforehand.
• Saw some Buddhist monks hanging up their laundry in their temple accommodation and smoking together, which of course I'm sure is pretty normal but it felt very odd  for to see them doing something so mundane.
• Tried to make a sandcastle with Anna's little sister who is four, but she refused on the grounds that it was too dirty, and managed to make me feel very immature for suggesting it.
• Was given an orange by a dragon dancer on the street.
• Have been kept awake most nights by ENDLESS FIREWORKS. Am continually reminded that it is new year in Asia.

Tonight I am surviving the heat with air conditioning and tomorrow night I will be figuring out how to survive getting from the airport to my flat in Beijing with only flip flops, and how to explain my attire to the Chinese taxi driver. I'm bracing myself for cold and constricted lungs as well as a quick transition from leisure to extremely hectic, which makes my return to China and classes sound a lot more depressing than I actually feel about it. For one thing, my parents arrive in Beijing just two days after me so it won't feel like the holiday is over, and a month of travelling with no daily routine is long enough to give normal life a fresh lease of novelty.

In the last week I've managed to visit three new countries, although for two of them the visit was so brief they almost don't count for much more than some stamps on my passport.
The first was Singapore where I spent the day with the lovely Peterson family, who welcomed me into their home at the early hours of the morning, then made me incredible pancakes followed by a rainforest walk before I had to catch my flight, it was awesome!
Followed swiftly by Malaysia and specifically Penang where my Beijing flatmate Anna's family live now, I've spent the week here with a weekend in northern Malaysia and an afternoon across the boarder in Thailand for a drink of coconut. I definitely can't complain, particularly when I know that during my average February I am loaded with work and cold (as many of you may be, I apologise for the contrast!).

I confess to knowing very little about Malaysia at all before I came here, nor had I really heard of Penang, the island that Anna's family lives on, and I can't say that I'm an expert on it now but here are some things I discovered.

• Malaysia is majority Muslim and in some areas such as the north extremely strict, but in Penang the population is mostly Chinese, and the opposition party is in power. 
• When we went up to the north for the weekend for a paddleboarding competition almost everyone was Muslim and you had to drive for half an hour to the nearest Chinese restaurant if you wanted to buy a beer. 
• Penang has loads of Chinese who have most of the wealth, but also plenty of Malay, Indian and Expats (Brits and Aussies). This unusual demographic results in awesome food and architecture. Mosques, temples, pagodas and churches are all over the place many of them huge and multicoloured. My favourite are the old mansion houses from the 1920s which have been left untouched for years, totally abandoned with vegetation growing in and around them all. They aren't allowed to be demolished because Penang is now unesco world heritage, but everyone wants to live in the new condos rather than convert the old buildings so they are left to look like something out of a Daphne Du Maurier novel. It's so cool.
• City of Georgetown on the east side and beaches on the west side, with rainforest and tropical friut farm in the middle that we drove through today on motorbikes. It's a very hard life!

A special place I didn't get to write about before in Vietnam

Cafe des Amis in Hoian, run by an old vietnnamese man who spends half his time teaching cooking in France and the other half running his restaurant on the riverside. He sits at the entrance smoking and welcoming people in, once you arrive he asks where you are from (so far not particularly unusual). Once he knows your nationality he brings out piles of hardback notebooks and pours through them, they are his comment books and he is looking for fellow Brits such as myself to show me their notes. The comment book is signed by everyone who has ever come as far as I can tell and they are all long and personal, with jokes, drawings (many portraits of him, Bethany contributed one while we were there) and praise of the amazing hospitality and cuisine. Once we stumbled on the cafe mid week for breakfast (I had amazing mango pancakes), we ate there for almost all our meals until we left, the food, service and atmosphere was totally unique, and it made me feel like me as comfortable as if  I were at home even though the whole experience was new and my home was nothing like the cafe on face value.
The pictures on the walls all contain his favourite french Jazz musicians or himself as a younger man cooking, one massive picture is of the musicians and him together, but we discovered from looking at an older photo of the restaurant in the scrapbooks that he had himself photoshopped into it as one book from a few years back had the same photo of the men without him awkwardly standing behind them. He wanders around the cafe singing along to his favourite lines in short bursts. To me it seemed like Mr Kim is someone totally happy with his current circumstances and desiring nothing more than to delight in the life he already has and share it with people as they pass through. Which is a pretty simple thing in some ways, and yet it's quite rare to find.

Overall highlights of the trip

• cycling to the beach through rice paddies and villages
• the restaurant on top of a hill in Penang which was built around some form of abandoned theme park, in the middle of nowhere and with an amazing view. 
• seeing the look of confusion on the Malaysia immigration officer at boarder control when he realised my exit stamp was dated just a few hours earlier. 
• going for a walk in the Singapore rainforest with Claire Peterson and dodging the monkeys.
• wandering through the Buddhist caves with sculpted stone buddhas in Marble Mountain.
• Watching the six nations one night then the superbowl the next with lots of passionate fans and not really knowing what was going on in either. 
• asking the Chinese people to pose so that we could take a photo of them after they asked us for a photo, and their looks of total confusion. 
• attempting to play Mafia on the boat round Ha Long Bay with the other passengers, none of whom were native english speakers and some who could barely speak any at all. Game was interrupted several times by 'Mr Sake' the old Japanese man who would start laughing for no reason and not understand anything that was going on...
• In Malay,  the word for water is 'air'.
• earning a free tshirt from hostel owner 'Monkey Jane' for bringing her some more customers we met on a bus.
• Being asked to 'buy something' by the stall owners, and then at Marble Mountain being asked to 'buy something marble' specifically. 

Oh My Gatos

I have just had two sunny weeks in Vietnam, the freezing winter of Beijing feels like a distant memory and not a reality that I will be returning to in just over a week. I'm getting very used to my only concern being which activity would be the most fun to do next, and feeling very spoiled. I'm pretty stunned that I've actually reached the half way point of my year, definitely so far SO GOOD! :)
Vietnam has a lot of cultural similarities with china because china occupied it for almost a thousand years, and the whole communist government aspect as well, but even the things that are the same definitely have their own distinct flavour. The communist government is actually more obviously present here, but it doesn't feel anywhere near as threatening. There are hammer and sickle flags everywhere, banners on all the lampposts and modern propaganda posters that look almost exactly the same as the old style ones that you can buy in souvenir shops, they just don't talk about killing Nixon and the American devils anymore. There are pictures of Ho Chi Minh and Lenin in the houses and shops (Uncle Ho as he is labelled in museums always has a very irritatingly lopsided beard I have noticed), the people here really love him still and he hasn't been reassessed or criticised like Mao so the personality cult remains. Seeing these things just doesn't feel threatening here at all compared to China, in Beijing it's not in your face but it's lurking and much more sinister feeling in its subtlety.
Vietnamese people also seem a lot happier than the Chinese, to make a broad unjustifiable generalisation. I think it'a clearest with the families you see and the children in particular, they all seem so much more free than the Chinese ones who are being tutored from the age of three and studying incessantly from then until graduation. There are siblings playing together, the children are cycling round by themselves or with friends, playing in the streets. I didn't realise how rare that is in China consciously until I got here and saw the healthy trouble free behaviour of the kids here.

We travelled from north to the south of vietnam and stayed in quite a lot of different places, but the one we stopped at for the longest was Hoian which is in the middle of Vietnam by the sea, beautiful and old. All across Vietnam everyone preparing for Tet festival which is the Vietnamese version of Chinese new year, and it's amazing. Ever since we arrived in Vietnam people have been transporting flowers, orange trees and bouquets around the cities on motorbikes to adorn the streets and houses. The pavements of most major roads now are no longer for walking on but full of blossoms. There are banners and lanterns strung across every street light, multicoloured Chinese lanterns and bunting wishing happy new year are abundant. At night by the river in hoian children were selling paper lanterns which are lit and drift off in the water, and there is incense lit in every nook I see. I mean this pretty literally, the cracks in the road and gaps in the tree bark are filled with incense as well as in the shrines and by temple offerings. There is a Buddhist shrine in every household near the entrance which is always pretty gaudy (some of them have neon lights) and they have been celebrating the hungry ghosts festival or something like that where you burn paper money and objects for your ancestors and leave out tables full of food for them to eat, almost exactly the same as what I saw happening in Taiwan last summer. 

The lunar new years eve was on Saturday and in Ho chi Minh where we were staying there was a massive fireworks display at midnight just like how we celebrate the normal new year.before the fireworks we wandered around the city centre which was beautifully decorated and full of families out celebrating, the flower displays were complete and people got dressed up and had photos taken next to them (this is exactly the same as in china). There were some big shows on in the park with stages set up and singers but the ones we saw were pretty baffling to a culturally unaware foreigner like myself. Since then the roads have been quite dead, but walking around we have seen a lot of seemingly spontaneous dragon dances, it seems like a van of teenage dragon dancers turn up on a street, do a dragon dance and attract a crowd, then drive away. Maybe it's more structured than it appears but to the untrained eye they come from nowhere and aren't advertised, they are really impressive though. 

The Vietnam war sites such as the war museum and the cu chi tunnels made a far bigger impression on me than I had anticipated, and I had been warned beforehand about them plenty times so I thought I was mentally prepared. Seeing this country in the context of the suffering it has been through it is really incredible how far it has come and how welcoming they are to westerners despite their experiences. In some ways the museums were very sensitive even if they were very propaganda fuelled, but I was pretty shocked that you can do paint balling as a tourist in the same place that fighting was so intense the locals were driven literally underground for over a decade. 

There is a lot more I could write about Vietnam but I'm leaving for Malaysia in just under an hour and no doubt you are bored by now, so I will leave it there! Happy year of the snake everyone :) 

Places I have been in Vietnam:

Hanoi

Ha long bay

Hue

Hoian

Ho chi Minh city

Fried Overlord Frog

I could go on about all the cool sights I've visited in the past week, how beautiful it all is and great weather just to make you very jealous, but I think it's a bit less like a copy of the Lonely Planet and a little more personal to talk about the people I've met in the past week in these places instead. I hope you find them as interesting as they were for me when I met them, although I don't think I can convey them very accurately.

Profiles of the Chinese people I've met on my travels in south China.

Guilin- Quiwei
I met Quiwei on the plane from Beijing to Guilin the first evening of my travels, she was sitting next to me and watching 'Love Actually' with Chinese subtitles on her laptop, which started a conversation pretty quickly. She is a student from Beijing Sports University one stop above me on the underground and her major is English, although we never used it to communicate. I thought this was strange at first as usually Chinese people love using westerners to practice on, but later I found out that she had actually wanted to do Maths or Economics as her major and didn't really like English very much or feel particularly skilled in it. By some fluke her GaoKao score was highest in English even though throughout school she'd been best at Maths, so she had been told that she had to take English instead.
She is a first year student returning back home for the first time since she started university for Chinese New Year, laden with lots of Beijing Specialty food to bring her family, like all the other Chinese people on the plane. I saw this as well in the Mid Autumn festival, everyone who is returning to their hometown for Chinese New Year always has lots of big red rectangular bags full of specialty foods from the area they are living in, none of them look appetizing to be honest but each to their own. Chatting to her on the plane, she said she wasn't looking forward to going home at all because now that she lived in Beijing she found her hometown really boring and she was going to miss her friends.
She recommended me local dishes, we exchanged numbers and on Friday she took me, Francesca and our new friend Harriet (another travelling Brit staying in the same hostel) around Guilin for the day to see the sights which was so nice!

Yangshuo
The Wedding
We rented bikes and went cycling through the countyside surrounding Yangshuo which is all very rural and beautiful. Francesca and I stopped on a bridge to take a photo over the river when I saw a group of Chinese people killing a massive pig by the riverbank. I wandered down to have a better look at what they were doing and was beckoned over by one of the guys, who turned out to be the groom to be of a wedding which was due to take place the following day. The people killing the pig with him were his family and close friends, and they were preparing the food for the 100 plus guests that would be attending the banquet. They invited Francesca and I to the wedding itself but unfortunately we were due to leave the area early the next day, but we stayed with them for lunch and chatted to the family a bit.
The whole wedding party were from the local area and it was difficult to be sure but from what I understood I think that it was an arranged marriage, the bride and groom had known each other for nine months. The groom had just started a little restaurant which they would run together once they were married, and the three pigs I saw killed, shaved and diced up (then participated in the eating of some parts) were ones that he had raised himself. The bride told me that the wedding date had been chosen based on its auspiciousness and that around Chinese New Year in general was a lucky time to get married (as well as practical because everyone is on holiday and at home). She is unusual as she is part of a family of four children, which is the first time I've met a Chinese person with that many siblings. The reason her parents had so many was because the first three were girls and her parents really wanted a son. According to the one child policy, her parents didn't have to pay the fine when her second oldest sister was born, but when she was born they had to pay, and they had to pay for her younger brother as well. She said that today having a son was still extremely important and that the ideal would be to get a girl first, then to be able to have a son second (you're allowed to try again if your first child is a girl I think).
They invited us to eat a hot pot with lumps of pig's  blood and other such items (I'm will have to admit that I ate mostly rice as much as was polite) with the family, and made us drink toasts with them using some homemade 'apple alcohol' which I had assumed was cider, but found out was in fact some form of very strong spirit...

Dragon's Backbone Rice Terraces
The village girl (totally forgotten her name, Chinese names are really hard to remember unless I see them written down)
In an attempt to save money on our trip to the rice terraces a group of seven of us decided to take the public bus within the nature park instead of paying the extra money for the tour guide. We ended up on the craziest bus ride that I've ever experienced, standing ticket clinging onto the pole for dear life as the bus speeds round cliffs, over dirt trails and up the mountain. It's not really possible to convey what it was like in writing but one indicatior of the extreme nature is that two native chinese people threw up on the bus, an old woman and a little boy (the woman threw up on my american friend and made the bus conductor have to stop the bus, mop the floor and repeatedly dry wretch before it could resume it's trail up the mountain).
Anyway, minor anecdote aside, we then arrived at the top and realised we'd got to the wrong village and didn't know the surrounding area at all. Luckily a girl from the village we had arrived at knew a hostel there and offered to take us to it, which we discovered was an hours hike up the mountain, as there were no more roads that took cars from that point on.
She was fifteen and had lived her whole life in the village of Tiantou, one of the smaller villages that collectively have a population of six hundred people. Her parents were native people from the Yao minority group that live in the mountains cultivating rice, her mum grew up in the village and her father in the one next door. I asked her if she planned on staying there too when she grew up and she said that her dad had told her from a young age that she had to study hard and leave the town when she grew up. Her family put a lot of emphasis on education which was unusual for the town, and they sent her to study and board in Guilin which is about three hours away (plus the crazy bus and hike) so that she could get a high school education. She gets to go home about once a month because to get back home is so difficult. It sounded like she has to deal with significant culture clash between herself and the students from the city that she studies with, in her home village there is no road or form of transport aside from by foot (I saw one mule) along little stone trails, the electricity turns on at seven and before that there are no lights, you have to light candles and cook food wearing head torches. The Yao old women have special traditional dress which they all wear and they never cut their hair their whole lives, but wear it on their head in a special bun. It is treated with some traditionak rice water formula that means it never goes grey or white, but stays jet black their whole lives. The girl had a bob, and when I asked why she said it wasn't convenient at school so she decided not to keep to the traditions, and that the traditional dress was troublesome so she didn't like wearing it.

Naning
While we were in Naning we ended up chatting to a girl who was travelling there and actually lived in Naning. When we told her we had a six hour layover in Naning before our train to Hanoi that evening she got so excited, took our numbers and said that we could spend the afternoon with her and her friends while we were there. I found out yesterday that she actually lives two hours away from the city and came up to stay with her cousins specially to show round her first foreigner friends, who she met at the station when we arrived and saw us back again in the end.
She brought along two guys, one her cousin and one her classmate which she had wrapped around her little finger, it was pretty hilarious. They took us to eat 'old friend rice noodles' which is a local specialty and then because our bags were heavy we went to a nearby arcade and hung out there for a few hours, before grabbing ice creams and heading on our way.
She studies business at a university in her province, and she has lots of part time jobs to fund her fees, which is pretty unusual from the other students I've met here where the parents usually pay. A lot of Chinese university students see themselves as above jobs like working in a restaurant which are done by people that can't pass high school, most of them don't work as well as study unless it is a high paid internship.
Her dream is to be a tour guide so that she can travel and work with lots of different people, but she finds English really hard so she doesn't think that she will be able to lead westerners until she can improve. She invited us to stay with her family for Chinese New Year if we weren't going to Vietnam and tried to make us come back to Naning (which has nothing of interest for a tourist, aside from the train station that you can go to in order to leave it). She was an excellent host and made what would have just been killing time into a really memorable experience!


Chinese New Year
The trains and airports are getting more and more crowded, I'm pretty glad that I've escaped when I did and missed the worst of it because it's going to be a nightmare.
Children in all the provinces have been let loose with lots of firecrackers and given free range to light and throw them wherever they please at will. Some of them are pretty dangerous so when you see the children chuck something and run away, I would advise you to do the same.
There are new year decorations being sold all over the place, strange blindingly gold and red shops have appeared out of nowhere in China and Vietnam selling massive read banners, hangings, and red envelopes called hongbao which are filled with money and given to the children by relatives.

Places I've been so far:
Guilin
Yangshuo
Xinping
Naning
Dragon's Backbone Rice Terraces (specifically the village of Tiantou)
and now Hanoi

Hanoi
So I will quickly talk about Hanoi because this is my first day outside China since I arrived in August so fairly significant. Approaching Vietnam from China instead of coming from the UK puts emphasis on totally different aspects of the culture, coming from Europe it would be the rice noodles, stereotypical straw hats and men playing Chinese chess on the street that would be the novelty, but for us we are gazing in awe at the bread, cafes and french style architecture (cross cultural exchange is a part of colonialism that we have been very appreciative of today!). The endless stream of traffic isn't overwhelming in particular (although it is all motorbikes rather than cars which is a novelty), it's the fact that the streets are only two lanes wide and don't look like major motorways.
I've been really surprised at how much I like this city, the street food is amazing, the buildings are beautiful and it manages to incorporate French and Chinese things that I am familiar with, yet still be totally unique.

Things I've enjoyed
That everything is sold in baskets which women carry around on their shoulders like giant scales, so you can never find what you're actually looking for because they are always moving around. Things I have seen sold in these baskets include: fruit, lumps of meat, doughnuts, bras, rice and the list gets stranger. The most dangerous was the one that had a camping stove frying tofu on one side of the basket while the woman walked around with plates and spoons on the other.
Vietnamese coffee is drunk from glasses on the side of the road on plastic stools with condensed milk instead of milk. It's delicious.

Sorry, this was a long one...

Have we day when the afternoon and consequently do not fly.

In recent news...
-Happy normal new year! So for this nothing really happens in china, people just go to sleep at normal time and then maybe have a lie in the next day, unless you are an expat, in which case you join with the other expats and celebrate together in a bubble of western culture.
-I finally finished my first semester at Beida on Wednesday, so it went from September 3rd to January 9th, a sickeningly long period of time. But now it is over and I'm free till its almost march! So I can no longer complain. :)
-Puffer jackets are everywhere, genuinely everywhere. I saw a dog wearing a puffer jacket last week. In most Beijing situations I say that puffer jackets are justifiable but in this instance I draw a line.
-The lake at Beida freezing is one of the few perks of having such cold weather, and ice skating on it for fifty pence per hour is awesome! If skating wasn't enough entertainment in itself, you can also watch the Chinese people on what can be roughly translated as 'Ice chairs' which are very basic sledges with fold out chairs put on top. The Chinese people are given some sticks and they try to slide along the ice in an extremely comical manner.
-I went to another Chinese child's birthday party at a karaoke bar yesterday, clearly it is the done thing. Watching small Chinese girls doing the gangnam style dance across the room was somewhat disturbing, but not as disturbing as them shouting along saying 'hey sexy lady' and having no idea what it means.


There were lots of other things I thought I'd begin this blog entry with, but then Beijing turned into a post apocalypse dystopia style environment, and I think that will have to take priority. The pollution has reached a new record high and even made the bbc news front page yesterday, which is saying something because pollution in Beijing isn't really news, it's usually just an accepted fact of life here. Every morning I don't really check whether its raining or anything like that, instead I look at the temperature, what the temperature actually feels like, and the pollution count. For those who don't live in a place where breathing is the same as chain smoking and generally accept that air is fresh, the pollution count should be around 25 if its a normal place. In Beijing it is reasonable to start complaining when it reaches about two hundred, by around three hundred fifty it reaches the level of normal conversation starter, and over four hundred is when you start trying to figure out ways of getting around being outside in any form.
It has been over five hundred for the past week and the past few days has fluctuated between seven and eight hundred.
On my helpful pollution reader, instead of labelling it as 'hazardous' or 'severe' it now just says 'beyond index'...
At night it looks like someone has decided to Instagram Beijing and make everything look the texture of an old cowboy film, you can only see about a building away because of the haze that fills every crevice, and it's even seeping indoors, in the underground the carriage is foggy. If you walk outside for any length of time your mouth is left with the taste of coal, and you end up exhausted.
Reasons for this: it's hard to tell what is truth and what is just the expat rumour mill but two justifications that seem fairly credible are that it is leading up to Chinese New Year where the whole country stops working so all the factories have doubled production intensity. This makes a lot of sense, China doesn't really seem to understand the concept of holidays being where people get to have a break. For normal new year my friends that are teachers did get New Year's Day off, but then normal school was put in on Saturday and Sunday for everyone to make up the lost days, so they just had eight day weeks after a day off in the wrong time instead of actually getting time off.
Another explanation for the unusual nature of the 2013 pre new year pollution is that we haven't had any wind or rain to move the pollution away, so it's just festering over me now. For some reason the Chinese government isn't being kind and making the weather change like it sometimes does. So this is one of the things I won't miss while I am travelling next month.

Which brings me nicely onto Spring Festival. Over the next few weeks everyone in China (the largest migration of people in the world) starts heading back to their hometowns for Chinese New Year, almost without exception. Beijing completely empties, and everyone flocks to the trains planes and buses to get back to their families. For many, this is the only time they actually go home per year, and they travel horrendous journeys to get there. Worse than long distance flights, I know Chinese people who will be taking thirty hour train rides each way to get home, and some will have standing tickets.
I won't be able to directly describe Chinese New Year in Beijing because I am also joining the mass exodus, but according to friends who have remained in town during previous New Years, Beijing takes on an empty war zone type feel. This is because those who remain celebrate new year by launching fireworks anywhere and everywhere without heeding any basic safety guidelines, as there are no basic safety guidelines. You can apparently see the clouds of smoke and flashes from the fireworks for the whole Chinese New Year week from the plane, and the death toll rockets during this period from firework related causes. Part of me is very sad to be missing this, but a bigger part of me thinks that being in Vietnam is actually a much better alternative.
At the moment I am preparing to leave the country and go travelling from the south of china to Hanoi by train, then down to Ho Chi Minh city and on to Malaysia to visit my flatmate Anna for the next month. The prospect of warm weather and fresh air is almost too beautiful to contemplate and I really can't wait!

Be waterful.

Latest news....
I have a laptop again for the first time in over two months! It's great.
It's averaging between minus fifteen and minus twenty at the moment, walking home with my head exposed briefly I honestly got a brain freeze from the outside in. And I confess, sometimes I wear a face mask, but I will not provide pictures.
I'm in China for the holiday season and really sad not to be doing the normal Christmas traditions.
However, don't feel too sorry for me because we have Holly, Will and Alice from Qingdao staying with us, and my Aunt and Uncle are also here for the holidays too which has been so much fun. Hosting forces you to do fun things :)
Everyone is wearing vibrant coloured puffer jackets, but only the Koreans can actually pull them off. Koreans make everything look cool.
We have decorated the apartment with all the Christmas decorations kind people have sent us, and it feels very festive.
The lake in the university is now frozen enough that we can skate on it which I really want to do soon!

This christmas will probably be one of the strangest I have, being away from home and in China where the influence of Christmas only goes as deep as some tinsel in western hotel lobbies. We talk about the commercialisation of Christmas in the west, but in China christmas isn't moving from a place of meaning and family to become more commercial, it is either nothing, or meaningless tackiness for the sake of it.
Christmas Eve in China is a dating night really and I have heard that eating out is virtually impossible because everywhere is swarmed with couples. One of my Chinese friends said in his province they give apples to people on Christmas Eve because in Chinese chirstmas eve is Pinganye 平安夜 which means night of peace, and apples are called 苹果 pingguo, so they give apples to people because of the wordplay. I was talking to some Japanese people yesterday and they also celebrate Christmas as a dating holiday. A stranger Japanese tradition though is that they always buy KFC for christmas, and you have to order it well in advance for an extortionate amount of money to get it. They couldn't clarify the reason for this unfortunately.
On Tuesday Bethany and I did a christmas party for the Chinese friends we have from Qinghua, and when we asked them what they knew about Christmas, the answer was that they knew about the 'Christmas old man' ( the translation of Santa into Chinese) and one girl knew that it was celebrating when God was born, because she had read a short story from a very famous Chinese horror story writer who used the christmas events as an influence in one of his stories and summarised the original at the beginning. Which I confess I didn't see coming.
We made them some roast chicken and then had christmas cookies on the table ready for decorating after dinner, but one of the guys thought it was part of the main course, and ate it with his knife and fork along with the salad, which was really sweet, and our fault really for putting them out early. He's only ever used a knife and fork twice, and I have been there both times, it is an honour.
I have managed to get to some carol services though, my church did one yesterday and then there is caroling at a Korean cafe nearby tonight which I'm looking forward to. A couple weeks ago I went to a christmas concert at the big Chinese church nearby, it was a combined concert of international congregations as well as the Chinese. Each different culture did their own performance, and it was so interesting hearing traditional songs from so many different places.
My Christmas is going to be spent with my aunt and uncle, classmates and new friends I have made here, so excellent company really. The Christmas dinner has also been dealt with by us going to the Ritz Carlton for lunch, which aside from my family roast is about as good as I can get! It's all come together very nicely, and even though it won't be the same as the traditional one I love, I'm sure it will still be good fun.
MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYONE!