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 ;)
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