The New Year!

Hello friends. Sorry I haven’t posted in a while, China got really busy after winter break ended. It was a fairly abrupt change to my everyday pace of waking up at noon and wandering aimlessly my apartment until something forces me to enter the outside world. It was cold, luckily, its warming up in China. Weather is slowly enter the 50s again, and despite northern China having the worst drought in more than 50 years and the most luxurious hotel under construction burning down two days ago, things are doing fine.

I spent most of the break either studying or lounging around, and topped it off with the celebration of the Spring Festival. This is the largest celebratory period in the Chinese calendar, and quite possibly the occasion triggering the largest period of human short term migration. Every year, millions of people return to their hometowns to celebrate the Spring Festival with their families. People go home to celebrate the “passing of the Year” and engage in about 2 weeks of eating, drinking, driving away ghosts, and seeing family. I spent the eve of the spring festival with a Chinese friend of mine whose parents came to visit Beijing.

During this period of time, you’re supposed to welcome the New Year by eating auspicious foods (long noodles for a long life, fish to bring financial prosperity, and well, I guess I also accidentally had my first taste of donkey, though, I’m not sure when and in what dish I had it, so I guess it wasn’t as climactic a “new food” experience as I hoped it would be). It’s also celebrated with Bai Jiu (Chinese “White Wine” or “Chinese Vodka”), which is about 50% alcohol, has a weird spicy taste, and had me thoroughly intoxicated within minutes. Now, I really only had one shot, but as you probably know, friends, that’s really all it takes. Then, come midnight, the fireworks began.

For the next two weeks, until the Lantern festival, every night was, in varying degrees, filled with fireworks, firecrackers, loud boom noise things that shoot up into the sky and set off car alarms for blocks, ground flowers, and roman candles. This country takes its fireworks seriously. Well, I’m not sure seriously is the right word for it, because I thought the city was going to burn down during the whole spring festival. The fireworks in the video, everything that you saw was produced by somebody who went to a fruit stand, threw down a couple hundred RMB, and then proceeded to “drive out” every ghost in China come nightfall. It was a bit terrifying sometimes to see people setting off fireworks so close to my apartment building, so close that some of them would burst right in front of my window. I got used to it after a while, and used to the barrage of firecrackers that seemed to go off everyday at sunrise.

It was fun while it lasted. Though, once the semester started, I barely had enough time to make dinner for myself. I'm currently working Monday, Wednesday, Friday, from 9:00am-6:00pm at CNN Beijing, and it's been a really amazing experience so far. This is the sort of Chinese speaking work environment experience I was hoping on having. I spent my days reading Chinese newspapers and researching through Chinese internet to find whatever the reporters are looking for. I think my favorite thing to do so far is translating/transcribing the interview tapes that they bring back into the office from Chinese into English. It has pushed my vocabulary to the limits, and has definitely given me an interesting taste of Chinese culture. At the same time, it's given me a new view of the media industry, a view which is forming and I will probably try to put it into words after I get back into the United States. But yes, China is definitely a place that is seeing growth and social innovations that suprise me as an American. For instance, people get addicted to the internet cafe's here. And I suppose I can't even call them internet cafe's because the Chinese don't even call them that. They call them "internet bars," and they are these dark, badly ventilated, greasy, rooms filled with computers that people can rent for a fairly low fee. Apparently, there have been several elementary and middle school students that have been skipping school to go hang out at the internet bars, so much to the point that it's created a group of truant students who are having difficulties coping with the real world in doing things like...finding jobs.

I suppose it might be somewhat equitable to people who game too much in the US, but it's just so fascinating to think that these internet bars are creating a new group of people that actually physically know eachother, as opposed to video games which can socially isolate people in the US.

Anyway, yeah, I work at CNN 3 days a week, and then tuesday/thursday, I have class from 9:00am-4:30pm, and Saturday I have class from 9:00am-noon. Each week is something that i really need to put my mind to, get goodnights rests for, and prepare for, lest I end up crashing. I really only need to keep up this lifestyle through April 18-19, the days in which I will submit myself to the Chinese proficiency exam. So I apologize now for my slowdown in correspondences.

Outside of work, life is good-- have a boyfriend now. He's nice. His name is rocky. He works as a school nurse in Beijing. He's from Seattle. Funny how things work out. 

Anyway, Happy Year of the Ox!

zaijian!

George