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!