新年快乐!

Happy New Year!
2012 is Year of the Dragon. It is amazing to get to be here in China to welcome to BEST zodiac year!

Due to the new year holiday, we have lots of vacation time from school. Tomorrow morning we leave for 3.5 weeks to travel to Cambodia and Vietnam! So on that note, I will be making this post short and mostly about my dad's visit.

This past week my dad came to visit with his wife. We had such a great time with them! I think they also had a great time. We had so much fun taking them to all of our favorite restaurants (of course). We did some good Beijing sightseeing. Plus we celebrated Chinese New Year while they were here.

The first day they experienced Tianyi, which might be a bit much for a first day, but since it's local, we figured why not dive right in!







We finally went up to Olympic Park and saw the bird's nest and the cube from the Olympics. It was one of the worst pollution days, though, so it kind of put a damper on sightseeing. It did make for some incredible pictures, though...










My dad and me in Sanlitun



Great Wall at Badaling
I would not necessarily recommend going to the Great Wall during the winter. It would be an understatement to say it was cold. Needless to say, we didn't stay on the wall for very long, but it was worth it for my dad and Debby to see the wall.



This was the way we got up the great wall. We thought it was going to be a cable car, but where the bus dropped us were these pulley things that felt like space mountain.



We grabbed lunch at a spot near the foot of the wall entrance. Here is the guy making our noodles...



This was a little girl on the bus who was dying to practice her English. Her name was Hannah. Here is her showing me Angry Birds on her mom's iphone, ha ha.



New Years -- EPIC.

As luck would have it, my dad's buddy who works for Delta was in town for CNY Eve and we met up with Ethan and went out altogether for Beijing Duck.

First we walked around Qian Men for a bit but didn't last long in the cold.


Then came the main event.


Here is the woman showing my dad how to fold up the duck slices in the little pancakes.



After dinner, my dad and his friends went back to the hotel and Chris and I left with Ethan and his buddy Vlad, a Ruski who was visiting from NJ. We walked over to Tiananmen Square and took a bunch of pictures in front of the Forbidden City.






At that point it was still early in the night, like 9pm. So we hopped a bus back to Ethan's house to drink a bit and kill some time before leaving to walk around Houhai (keep in mind it is about 20 degrees outside). There was much celebrating going on in and around Ethan's house, meaning fireworks EVERYWHERE! They were setting them off in all directions from Ethan's house, including in his front yard (tilt your head to the left -- I took the video sideways, oops):





After pre-gaming at Ethan's, we hopped in another bus (taxis were hard to find during the holiday) and just rode it north.
Here is a picture of me watching the fireworks in the street from the bus.




We jumped out at a random intersection and set off some fireworks there, then finally caught a cab to Houhai. Here is Ethan lighting the roman candle, and then him holding it while it goes off.







When we approached the lakes, that is when things got crazy. As it got closer to midnight we were walking deeper into Houhai. Around 11:45pm, not only were fireworks going off in ALL DIRECTIONS from where we were standing, but multiple firecrackers were being lit in many directions close to where we were standing so we could FEEL the explosions in our chests. Instead of looking out to see the fireworks, we had to look UP. For about 45 minutes, things were so loud and out of control, I have really never experienced anything like it.









Pieces of firework shrapnel were raining down on us as Chinese guys with cigarettes lit BOX after BOX of fireworks within meters of us. Here is a picture that looks so bright, almost like it was taken during daylight. You can see the boxes of fireworks on deck:


You can see the piles of red shavings from the spent fireworks piling up:




I tried to capture the experience with a couple videos but even they don't really show sufficient intensity:




After a couple of hours we needed to get out of the cold for a minute so we did what you are supposed to do on Chinese New Year -- ate dumplings! We found a Xinjiang dumpling place down in the hutongs and ate plate after plate of dumplings. Then when we ordered some chao bing, we realized, what exactly is IN chao bing? When we tried to ask the lovely family that was running the restaurant, they offered to take us into the kitchen to see them make it! It was so neat. (What's in it? Cabbage, shredded dough, garlic, oil, salt, and a biiiig scoop of MSG!)




After we left the dumpling place, we walked and walked to a bar near Drum Tower and played some pool until 4am. It was a proper way to wind down the hectic evening. We definitely slept the whole next day =)






As I type this, it is three full days after the official CNY and I can still hear and see fireworks going off outside my window, one right after the other. This is really one of the coolest things I've gotten to experience -- Chinese New Year (a DRAGON year, nonetheless!) in Beijing.

We leave tomorrow for our 3.5 week vacation to Cambodia and Vietnam so I anticipate a nice long post to follow this one... Next month ;)

Too cool to count it down...

The first thing to report was our incredible experience with Chasketball. That is, Chinese Basketball. We went for Chris's birthday with some friends of ours and it was amazing. Our seats were KILLER. The most striking part of all of it was how fast the game went. There were so few fouls called; it was really remarkable. We are so used to watching NBA where they try so hard to get called on EVERYTHING. Plus, all the timeouts -- there were only like 3 timeouts for each team. The game literally took 90 minutes to play. The other only slightly less remarkable part of the game was how terrible and pathetic the cheerleaders were. I think I took like 10 videos of them just because I was cracking up so hard at how terrible they were. I am including some pictures below of the game, etc.








Beijing Ducks win!


Seriously, what are they WEARING? I did think the mascot looked sort of like Sebastian the Ibis!



Here is a guy who befriended Ethan and whose nephew owns the restaurant we were eating at. He kept buying beers for the three of them and kept doing "gan bei" which means "cheers" in Chinese, except it actually means "drink it all" so it's rude to not finish your drink when doing this kind of cheers. Luckily, I was drinking tea so that's all I had to chug, while those two had to keep up with this guy. This process went on for almost an hour. It was pretty hilarious. It ended with him taking photos with each of us for his wallet.



Chris and I both have students going to Barnard next semester so we have been very excited telling them all about New York and all of our favorite things to do. One of those favorite things includes eating lots of pizza (!) so before finals we took them all out to eat pizza to get them psyched about their trip. We had such a lovely time. They are all so incredibly sweet and part of me envies them for getting to go live it up as a student in NYC right now! =)



Christmas. Christmas morning was filled with Skype sessions with family back home but once things settled down, Chris and I did presents. I was so happy that I got an OVEN for Christmas!! That means time to bake cookies and brownies and everything I miss so much about sweets back home! The majority of the rest of my gifts were tea/coffee related -- a to go coffee mug, a very-Chinese tea set (I DO tea now), and these awesome mugs from one of Chris's students. I also got him a couple of those mugs so now we are mug rich. They are all temperature sensitive and change designs when hot so we have been having fun with that =) I was also lucky enough to get some long-distance love from my family and friends -- thank you to everyone who mailed me (us) presents! We really felt the love. It definitely felt like Christmas.








My favorite gifts though, would have to be from my students. A couple of students gave me gifts individually, but on Christmas Eve, I found a big stocking on my apartment door and it had a stuffed dragon inside (2012 - year of the dragon) and also 18 separate cards inside envelopes with handwritten messages from each of my students from one of my senior classes. I was so very touched. I definitely was crying when I was reading them. It was the best present a teacher could ask for! I definitely used my oven to bring them some baking love the following week =)




Chris mentioned wanting to go out for dinner the night after Christmas for a couple of weeks beforehand. However, when Christmas weekend came, I was feeling terrible. I had the worst head cold and tried to quarantine myself in our apartment for the entire weekend so I could get better (since it was finals week). Still, Monday came and he said we were going out. I asked why couldn't we go out another night during the week and he said because we had made plans. I was feeling so terrible, I BEGGED him to let me stay in and he said "no". That is when I KNEW something was up because he would never push me to go out when he knew I was feeling so horrible. So long story short, he takes us to the giant egg (see second ever Beijing blog post!), National Center for the Performing Arts. He had surprised me with tickets to Swan Lake!!! What an amazing present! I would never even ask him to sit through a ballet and instead he volunteered to. Plus, he will have to sit through another one because we just found out the foreign teachers are being taken to go see The Nutcracker on Thursday! Yay, two ballets in one month! =) He is a trooper.
The inside of the NCPA was so cool. We took so many pictures =)










So every year they throw a New Years Gala at our school for all of the students to perform dances and musical numbers for the school president and other foreign ministers. This year, THE Foreign Minister was there, aka China's version of Hilary Clinton. And at our foreign teachers dinner the week before (see picture below), they asked some of the younger teachers if they would do a performance as well. After much hemming and hawing, it was decided to do a singing performance of "Lean On Me" (of which is STILL in my head a week later…). Reluctantly, I am including a link to the YouTube video… (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sNx7ug4eFA&feature=player_embedded) Please, no judgment. Two lucky aspects of this performance -- 1) one of the teachers, David, is actually a very good singer and didn't mind taking the lead on this one (he is the one you can hear over everyone, including that last little "lean on meeeee" at the very end, ha), and 2) my microphone wasn't even working, meaning I was just there for moral support. We had many people congratulate us and tell us what a great job we did, but honestly, had you seen the students' performances (they had been practicing for MONTHS) you would have known they were just being polite. I am noticing that here it is much more about effort and not taking yourself too seriously, versus actual talent. Thank god. =)
Foreign Teachers dinner



New Years was nice -- we had a nice dinner at an American restaurant and I had a real burger! It was a New Years miracle! Then we met up with some friends and went together to a jazz club. On the way in the cab, I sat in the front seat and the driver totally loved my hat and kept smiling and commenting how much he liked it (Ethan translated from the back of the cab). THEN, knowing we were a bunch of laowais (whiteys) he started pumping Backstreet Boys old school style! I definitely impressed him by knowing every single word and singing it loudly for him. When we got to the jazz club, there was a band playing some really chill music. Maybe too chill. As it approached midnight, everyone in our party was glancing at our watches/cell phones and at one another wondering if they were going to wrap it up soon to do a countdown. And, no, they did not. These guys played right through to 2012! They were chipsters, too -- like, too cool for a countdown. Which was fine. We did our own quiet cheer and hugging/kissing when we saw it was midnight and some people near us did the same. Typical low key New Years in China, I'm learning (the main event is Chinese New Year, mid-January). After the jazz club, we went to another bar and then ended our night with 24 hour dim sum! You would think a three story dim sum restaurant at 3am would be fairly tame but it was just the opposite -- we had to wait 15 minutes for a table! The entire place was hopping. I am including a picture of the jazz band and of Chris patiently waiting for our number to be called at the restaurant, circa 2:30am.




My new year's resolution is to work more on my formal Chinese. We started lessons today, despite going away in a couple of weeks for the holiday. I just figured the more time we spend putting it off the longer it will be before we are knee deep in it. So we plan to continue our lessons when we return from holiday. But why not start now?

Chris and I keep remarking how amazed we are that it is already New Years. It feels like our time here is just flying by. On that note, I will leave with some random photos.

Here are some Christmas decorations in our building (including the creepy Santa)


2012 Beijing!


creepy weird "baby on board" sign



Love this sign…



Here is some delicious coffee