The Chinese New Year, authentic Chinese style

Sunday was arguably the most important day of the year for Chinese people - Chinese New Year's Eve. At about 4 in the afternoon my entire baba's family came over. He cooked a huge meal and everyone ate ungodly amounts of utterly delicious Chinese food. At about 8 I went outside our apartment building with my sister, baba, two cousins, and an uncle to light fireworks. The Chinese New year is interesting in that it is like Christmas, Thanksgiving, and the 4th of July mashed together into one enormous holiday. There is gift giving (not quite as much as Christmas), excessive food consumption, and an insane amount of firework lightage-offage (definitely not a word). So... we headed outside, lit off our fireworks, and then went back inside to watch the CCTV New Years show that broadcasts throughout China. My sister mentioned that at midnight the sky would light up with more fireworks than I had ever seen before in my life, but I truly did not comprehend the enormity of what she tried to convey until I saw it myself. At about 11 pm my dad's family left, and we began cleaning up and getting ready to go to my maternal grandparent's house for the rest of the night (apparently no one sleeps on New Year's Eve/ New Year's morning). At 11:50 we piled in the car, and raced down the fourth ring road towards my grandma's house. Sure enough, at midnight, the sky exploded. It literally cannot be described with words. Front, back, left, right - every possible place you could look had fireworks exploding in every color imaginable. It was AMAZING. And what's even more - the government had nothing to do with it. Every firework in the sky was lit off by private families. My sister says every year the same phenomenon happens. I have to say, I think this is something that every person should see before they die, because it is truly mind blowing. And for some reason it made my sister and I giddy and happy. So anyway, we got to my mom's parents house and had the second huge feast of the night, then the adults started playing a classic Chinese game called Majiang. It is a fun game, but moves at an uncomfortably quick pace and forces your brain to use math skills incessantly. At about 3 AM, I conked out on my grandparent's bed. My mom, aunt, uncle, and grandpa continued to play. I woke up at 7 to the sound of the adults still playing Majiang (they played continuously for 6 hours, not kidding). My family has a tradition of going to the Lama temple (a huge Buddhist temple in Beijing) every New Year's morning, so at about 7:15 we stumbled sleep-deprived into the car and went to the temple. After walking through a hutong for 40 minutes and waiting in multiple obnoxiously large crowds of people, we got into the temple, made our wishes, bowed three times to the Buddha, witnessed a pick-pocket being taken out by the police, and left. From what I hear, Chinese belief is that if you make a wish at the Lama temple on New Year's morning, It will really come true. We'll see. At noon that day, I finally got to climb into bed and promptly conked out until 6pm. And that was my New Year's Day:)

I'll write more in 3 weeks. Until then, toodles. 

Madre In China

This post will have to be short because today is the one of the most important days in China- Chinese New Year's Eve. I won't be sleeping for the next 25 hours or so because of all the festivities. Anyway, I just wanted to put up a few pictures from when my mom came to China. We stayed in Beijing and I took her to the Forbidden City, the Zoo (to see pandas of course), the Great Wall, etc. On New Year's Eve we went to a modern area of Beijing called Sanlitun to eat and get our nails done. The Chinese don't make a very big deal out of New Year's Eve but at midnight they had a countdown and confetti:) Twas a jolly time, and I had a hard time not getting on the plane with her and flying back to America when she had to go. Haha. 

In 5 days I will be leaving for Yunnan province (in the southernmost part of China, bordering Vietnam and Myanmar) where I will be for a three week Winterim trip, so no internet or blog posting. I will be sure to blog about it when I get back. 

The first picture is of my dad at Tiananmen Square- I forgot to include it in the last blog and thought it was mildy humorous. The rest are of my mom's visit. 

The Unabridged Story of the Lost Cell Phone

Saturday December 27, the second day my mom was here, I lost my cell phone. Or, more specifically, I left it in a cab. This was bad for numerous reasons: I had no other way to communicate with people (save for Facebook), I had an enormous amount of minutes on the phone at the time (China has no cell phone plans, it is all pay-as-you-go), and I had plans to go to the Great Wall the following day with my friend Kara, her mom, and my mom. Since it was after midnight when I lost the phone (I had been out Karaoke-ing, hehe), I decided the best thing to do was simply return to the hotel where I was staying with my mom, and worry about everything in the morning. Jumping back in time a bit, when my dad first arrived in China for business a week before he came to visit me, his company lent him a chinese cell phone to use for business purposes. When he left China, he gave me the phone and the address of his business associate's office, and asked me to mail it back to the company. Now jumping forward in time to 11:30 A.M. the morning after I lost my phone, I remembered that I still hadn't mailed the phone, and in fact, had it sitting in my backpack. So, needless to say, I whipped it out, went online to Kara's facebook, got her cell phone number, and called her. Turns out, she and her mom were already on their way to the Great Wall, but it was at least good to call her and let her know what had happened to my poor little cell phone. There was, however, still one thing that needed to be taken care of. My host sister was expecting a call from me to let her know when my mom and I would like to go out to dinner with the host fam. Which brought me to my second predicament: I didn't have my host sister's number. I only had it saved in my phone, which was long gone. I was also a wee bit scared to admit to my host family that I lost my cell phone, because I knew they would be slightly irked by my stupidity. So... I'm not sure when it was, but eventually I realized that I had my host sister's number written down in my room back in my host family's apartment. I finally gathered up the courage to tell my sister that I had lost my phone on Tuesday, which was the same day I was supposed to call her regarding the family dinner. I returned to the apartment, found her number, and called her from the host fam's home phone. Upon learning that I had lost the phone, she was surprisingly nice, and promptly announced that she had lost a total of 7 phones in her life. That made me feel exponentially better. Anyway, she told me that we could go out to dinner that night, and that we would worry about the lost phone then. Here's where the story gets a little more interesting. As we were walking into the restaurant that night, my sister told me that we could get all my minutes back (300 kuai's worth), and have the cell phone company save them for my next phone. She wasted no time, and as soon as we had been seated, called the phone company. The service person at the other end of the line was unhelpful at best, and after my sister bickering with him for quite some time (I didn't catch much, but I did hear her say in fast, slurred Mandarin, "I think you have a listening problem" and "Give me your manager. YOUR MANAGER. Do you know what a manager is?"), she hung up and announced that I couldn't get the minutes back unless I had the pin number of my cell phone, which had been given to me on a small card when we had bought my cell phone and first round of minutes (literally the first night I arrived in China). So at that point I began to think that this whole ordeal wasn't worth it... I had no clue where the card with the pin number on it was, and I knew I would never see my cell phone again. But my sister was adamant that we keep trying. In addition, while she on the phone with the phone company, my mom called my cell phone number and SOMEONE ANSWERED. And my mom said "Hello? is this your phone number?" and the person said "yes" and then conversation went on for about another 30 seconds before my mom announced that she was the owner of the phone and the person on the other end hung up. Before the mystery person hung up, however, my sister managed to shout across the dinner table that we were going to call the cops if they continued to use the phone. And i've got to admit, my sister can be pretty intimidating at times, so I thought she might have intimidated the "robber" at least somewhat. After dinner, I returned to my host family's apartment to look for the questionably legendary pin number card. And miracle upon miracles, I found it sitting in my desk drawer. My sister called the phone company and this time had success removing my minutes from the lost phone. She also told me we could go online and find out who the people who were using my phone had called. Although I was tired from all this excitement and would have preferred to return to the hotel and get some sleep, she insisted that we go online to find the outgoing phone numbers that my phone had called after I lost it. Large predicament number three: After we had typed my phone number and pin number into the website in order to view the numbers my phone had called, a notice came up saying that the phone company was sending a password via text message to my phone, and we needed to type that in to continue. That, of course, did us no good. So we got offline and my sister said that she would take care of everything tomorrow. I was content with that. The next day, wednesday, I went to a movie with her. Here's where this excruciatingly long story actually starts to pick up a bit... on our way to the movie, my sister whipped out the extreeeeemely long list of every number I had called in the month of December, and told me that she had gone to a China Mobile store earlier that day and used a pretty clever method to get the list. Here's how she did it: In China, every phone has a SIM card. It is what gives your phone identity and holds every piece of information you have stored on it, from your phone number to your contacts to your text messages. If you put your SIM card in someone else's phone, and then turn his/her phone on, that phone will now have your contacts, your texts, and your phone number. If people call your number, It will now ring on their phone. My sister got my phone number and minutes taken off my SIM card and put on a new one, and then put the new one in her phone so that when the company sent the verification text (the one we needed the night before when we were trying to find my phones outgoing calls online), HER phone would receive it. Pretty smart, actually. And while she had my new SIM card in her phone, someone called my number. She answered, and discovered that this someone was a coworker of the person now in possession of my phone. She didn't realize they were a coworker of the "robber's" at first, so she asked them who they were, and they said they were Mr. Wang, and that they were the day time driver of taxi number suchandsuch. She thought it was peculiar, but didn't know exactly what to say, so she told them this was her number, and hung up. Now jumping ahead in time to when we were on the way to the movie... we were taking a look at this mile long list, trying to figure out exactly when the first call was made after I lost the phone, when suddenly my sister said "wait, I recognize this number...". And what do you know? The first number the "robber" (presumably the taxi driver who drove the taxi I left my phone in, coworker of "Mr. Wang") called after getting my phone was the same number that called my sister when she had my SIM card in her phone. Using our FBI minds, we concluded that this number was probably important, so my sister called it right before we went into the movie and a lady answered. My sister asked if she knew a Mr. Wang and the lady said no. And then my sister went into hard-core mode and began being a little less friendly to this stranger lady. She told the lady how she had gotten the number and what the situation was, and then announced that she would be promptly calling the police if the lady didn't cooperate and tell her what she knew about the situation. Then my sister said thank you (in mean voice, of course) and hung up. Meanwhile, I was sitting in the backseat pretty much astounded at my sister's detective skills and determination to get my phone back. The funniest thing is that my sister viewed this whole thing as kind of fun, like a game. She sounded mad when she was on the phone with the lady, but as soon as she got off, she looked back at me, smiled, and laughed. I love having a big sister. So anyway, after we got out of the movie, my sister got a call from the 北师大 (the university my school is associated with, near my house) security police saying that someone had brought a phone in and told them to call this number. 

And just like that, I had my beloved phone back. 

P.S. My sister later got an angry text from the lady saying "You got your phone back. Happy now?"... hehe. We had a good laugh over that. 

Winter Break

Oh dear... so much to say! I'll start with the beginning of Winter Break. My dad arrived in Beijing on the 18th of December. On the 19th was the annual SYA Christmas dinner to kick off winter break. It was very enjoyable, but unfortunately, all the I have no pictures because they are all on my dad's camera. The first Monday of break, my dad and I flew down to Shanghai for a little vacation. Shanghai is much larger than Beijing, and is modernizing extremely rapidly. From the airport to our hotel near the Bund, 95% of the cab ride was on a raised highway that twisted through a mess of skyscrapers and old apartment buildings. I thought Beijing was sprawling, but it is nothing compared to Shanghai. Our hotel room overlooked the Yu Gardens, Huangpu river, and Pudong district (across the Huangpu from our hotel). At night, Shanghai was a blaze of neon lights. One entire side of a citibank skyscraper lit up into an enormous advertisement. The Bund (the Lakeshore Drive of Shanghai) was under huge construction, presumably in preparation for the 2010 World Expo, which will be held in Shanghai. We went up into the Pearl tower, which is roughly the height of the Empire State Building and looks kind of like a needle sticking out of the ground with glass circular rooms for people to look out of. Its appearance is hard to describe, so I'll just include a picture. I found Shanghai slightly dirty than Beijing in places, but it definitely has a more energetic feeling to it. I guess I would also describe as a little bit more Western. A couple downsides about Shanghai were that most taxi drivers were rude, and the traffic was pretty atrocious. Other than that, though, I found Shanghai to be very enjoyable and am glad I was able to visit a new place for Christmas. I will post about my adventures with my mom in a couple of days. 

The pictures are of my dad and I at dinner with my host mom and sister, my dad eating with chopsticks (which is a rare occurrence since he can't use them to save his life), the daytime view from our hotel room (overlooking part of "Old Shanghai", the Huangpu river, and the new Pudong district) a view of the Pearl tower from the ground, and the glowing Pudong District at night (view from across the river). And for some reason they loaded in the opposite order of how I stated them, so looking at them from bottom to top would be a wise idea:)