Winter Break

Friday, December 19^th marked the start of my winter break. While I was taking my Chinese finals, my family was on the long flight from San Francisco to Beijing. They arrived at the Beijing Airport at 4 in the afternoon and came directly to the SYA dinner being held for all of the Chinese host parents and American parents visiting. The dinner was a great scene, it’s really fun to see all the host parents, American parents, and students together, but it was a bit hectic for me. Upon arriving with my host parents, I went over to the front of the room to set up a slideshow a friend and I had prepared for the parents. Just as everything was almost set up I spotted three curly haired heads moving about the crowd; no doubt my parents and little brother.

I ditched the slideshow setup to go greet my family who I hadn’t seen in four months, giving them all big hugs. I brought my jet legged family over to our assigned table and introduced them to my host parents. Ni haos and hellos were exchanged and we all sat down. Since neither my parents or my brother speak Chinese, and my host parents don’t speak English, I was on translation duty for the night. My host mother reported to my American parents that I was very hard working and clean, while my American parents commented on how the food just never stopped coming and how crazy my host mom was. She especially took a liking to my little brother, who was the subject of countless picture with my host mom and her friend. My Chinese skills were stretched to the limit, my talkative host parents would go on for paragraphs without break, and my American parents were tugging on my shirt sleeve asking me what they were saying as I tried to translate properly. Amid this I needed to finish setting up the slideshow, and all of a sudden I get a call from one of my friends asking for directions to the restaurant. AGH!! Luckily, after about an hour when my family had been introduced to my teachers and friends, it calmed down a bit.

My slideshow ran for about seven minutes, showing pictures from our fall travel trip and ending in sync with the music ( 北京欢迎你 – Beijing Welcomes You, a song made for the Olympics). During the dramatic finale of the song, after the last picture, the closing slide appeared reading “海外学年 2009-2009” Ops! Anyone who reads my blog closely will know that I make a lot of spelling mistakes (mostly from lack of time to proofread my posts), but you think I could have gotten a slideshow with less than ten words right. Oh well.

In the following week and a half I showed my parents around Beijing, hitting most of the big tourist locations and a few local spots that I like. The most interesting day was the day spent on bicycles, which is my preferred method of transportation. We rented four rickety bikes in Houhai and biked through hutong, along the second ring road, up Kinjiekouwai Dajie and parked outside of my school. Biking in Beijing is a unique experience. At first glance it seems dangerous; nobody wears helmets and most of the time you are dodging and swerving to keep from hitting busses or cars. The first time I biked to school by myself in Beijing I was convinced that I was either going to be mowed down by a bus or get terribly lost. The more you ride, the more you get used to the flow of traffic and pace of things. All of the streets have bikes lanes, and cars and busses are looking out for bikes and are used to stopping or swerving to avoid hitting them.

Back to the family, they handled the bikes pretty well, following me onto what was essentially a freeway bike lane without getting in any accidents. I showed them around my school and my favorite shops in the neighborhood. They tried 春卷, a really big spring roll, 大饼 a tasty layered pancake snack, and HiChew, a Chinese version of Starbursts, but better. We biked up to my apartment and then back to school so they could see how I came to and from school every day. Further down from school I bought them a bubble tea, which is milk tea with little tapioca balls in the bottom. Bubble tea is available in hundreds of flavors and is pretty popular with the younger generation here. It is gaining traction in America too; Bay Area readers can try it out at the Lynx Cafes. The bike ride back went smoothly and after returning the bikes we settled down in the Houhai Starbucks to fulfill their daily caffeine quota.

On Christmas Day we flew to Shanghai. My Christmas present was 3 pounds (ten bars) worth of Hershey’s and Scharffenberger dark chocolate (the only thing easily available in Chinese stores is Dove). Shanghai was interesting, the sheer size and number of skyscrapers and apartment buildings is mind-blowing and the mix of foreign and Chinese architecture on the Huangpu side is a bit quirky. Even though Shanghai is a vibrant business center, by the end of the trip I was glad I was in Beijing, a city with much less foreign influence and many more ancient buildings and parks than Shanghai. My parents left on December the 30^st. After they left I had five days on my own to explore Beijing.

My first day off I decided to visit the Zhong Hai Electronic Mall. Situated in the middle of Haidian district (often called Beijing’s Silicon Valley), and being a bit of a geek I figured it would be fun to go take a look. The Zhong Hai Electronics Mall was described to me as full of second hand and counterfeit electronics at dirt cheap prices. Legitimate electronics malls are everywhere in Beijing (I have three Best Buy sized electronics stores lined up next to each other about 3 minutes away from my house), so I figured that this would be an interesting change of pace. After a chilly bike ride west along the fourth ring road, I arrived at the market.

Inside I was greeted with row after row of computer-related stuff, everything from laptops to headphones could be purchased. Most of it was second hand; used generation-old computers with beefed up RAM and hard drives sat re-shrink wrapped on the counters waiting to be purchased. If you were not looking for a new computer, components were ubiquitous. Hard drives, video cards, RAM sticks, processors, fans, cables, and motherboards sat stacked on top of each other in careless piles.

I perused the aisles for a while, astonished that these vendors could stay in business. Like many Chinese markets, the guy one stall down would often be offering the exact same thing as the stall you are looking at. The most popular stall seemed to be the computer building/repair variety where you could get your computer upgraded with new hardware or software. Unlike in tourist markets, vendors didn’t harass me when I walked by, a nice change of pace from the typical pressure put on by China’s omnipresent salespeople. Ironically, when I walked into a different electronics market across the street that had authorized brand name retailers like Dell and Sony, I was endlessly harassed by the salespeople.

Later that week some friends and I decided to visit Houhai, which was now frozen thick enough to ice skate on. However unlike in the States, you could do much more than just ice skate. Aside from skates you could also rent ice bicycles (bikes with skates on the sides do you don’t have to balance on the ice), and sleds. These were not your typical American sleds though, what they had for rental were school chairs welded to blades, and to propel yourself they give you two screwdrivers welded to metal rods with sharpened tips. Unable to resist the makeshift sleds, we each rented one. Maneuvering was pretty similar to steering a canoe, only the lake was packed with people so we had a lot of close calls. It was pretty cool to sled within site of the Drum and Bell Towers and I would highly recommend it if you even visit Beijing in the winter.

That’s all for now, I am still pretty busy in school, but only for two more weeks. Chinese New Years （春节）starts soon and it is of the biggest holidays of the year here so we get a bunch of time off to celebrate. After 春节 the program will be heading down to Yunnan for three weeks to travel and explore the area and bask in the warm weather. Hope everyone had a great holiday break!