That’s Numberwang! 神奇数字

So we were recently informed that China experienced a wedding boom on the 4th of January, with up to 10,000 couples pledging their troth in Beijing alone. All because of that particular date’s homophony to the phrase ‘I will love you all my life’. Personally I think 二零一三一四 (er ling yi san yi si 2013/1/4) similarity to  爱你一生一世 (ai ni yi sheng yi shi I will love you all my life) is pretty tenuous, but I guess it must be a native speaker thing.

The Chinese, while being highly rational, strongly value the significance of certain numbers over others. Trying to grasp them all might seem a little bit like Numberwang at first, but with a little understanding of the background, all will become clear. The idea behind getting married on 04/01/2013, and 12/12/12, is the hope that the auspicious symbolism of the date will bless their marriage. Many of the older generation will encourage their children to visit fortune-tellers, who, upon analyzing the exact time and date of a couples’ birth, can forecast their compatibility and future together. Such is the power of numbers.   

Of course, the nature of the Chinese language has lead to many numbers picking up double meanings from words sharing the same pronunciation. The most common example is ‘8’(bā), whose propitious homophone means ‘wealth’ in Cantonese. On the other end of the scale sits poor number ‘4’ (sì) associated with death (死 sĭ). 

Other lucky numbers include ‘6’ (六), because of the phrase 六六大顺 (liu liu da shun), which is an expression used to wish the smooth process of something, to be without hindrance. Therefore it’s not unusual to see car number plates bearing double, or even triple sixes, much to my original dismay at seeing the Number of the Beast. By the same token, if double 6 is a lucky number, simple maths entails that 12 must be as well! Consequently 12/12/12 saw a record number of Chinese weddings, before 04/01/13. In addition (terrible maths pun, please forgive me), there is the fortuitous number 9 (九 jiu). As well as being the largest single digit number, 9 also sounds like 久 (jiu), meaning a long time. With Chinese culture known for venerating the elderly, wishes for a long and healthy life are always welcome. I was told by a teacher that the steps leading up to important buildings are normally grouped in nines. Maybe if we had more lucky numbers more people would be interested in mathematics.   

Numbers have also entered Chinese online slang; 520 (五二零 wu er ling) is shorthand for ‘I love you’ (我爱你 wo ai ni), and 94 (九四 jiu si) has come to be a simple phrase signaling agreement, due to its likeness to ‘that’s right’ (就是 jiu shi). Accompanying the growth of English education, numbers such as 88 and 3Q have picked up meaning. 88 (bā bā) sounds like ‘byebye’, and 3Q (san q), I’m sure you can guess by now, stands for ‘thank you’. 

Also, the Chinese are able to count to 10 using gestures on just one hand, and everyone uses it, which comes in useful when I can't understand particularly strong accents. 

That’s enough number crunching from me, 'til next time!

Beijingle Bells 北京欢乐圣诞歌

On the 22nd of December the Qingdao crowd (if three people can be called a ‘crowd’) headed for a reunion with the Cambridge Beijing posse, with a plan to spend Christmas together. The more, the merrier. Of course, the whole trip was thrown into doubt as we waited to see if the world would end on the 21st. Evidently, it was not the apocalypse, and we made it to Beijing safely. Safely and in style, as we had tickets for 1st class. Bwahaha. 

Life is sweet in 一等

Eager to give us a taste of Beijing, Kate queued for 45 minutes to buy bags of cake (everything comes in bags; milk, beer, you name it). Don’t be fooled by its homophonous evil twin as I was, this was date cake, not ‘date rape’, as I misheard. There was a simple reason why the queue was so long; it’s scrumptious. It’s like a rich, fluffy sponge cake, that soaks up milk like, well, a sponge. Apparently it comes straight out of the oven into bags to be sold, and it’s baked while you queue! Literally selling like hotcakes. A few minutes in the Beijing winter is easily cured by eating warm freshly baked date cake dipped in milk.

Sorry if you wanted insightful cultural comments and instead you just got an ode to cake.

As I have been to Beijing before, I was able to avoid going to Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City, the Palace Museum, etc., because all of them would have involved going outside for prolonged periods of time. I don't know how to effectively convey a sense of Beijing's winter, apart from saying it was very, very cold. Luckily, the one place I was willing to visit was relatively nearby; Beijing/Peking University, known to Chinese as Beida 北大. Beida and Qinghua University are the Chinese equivalent of Oxbridge, to such an extent that they even tried to hold a Beijing-Qinghua boat race, until it was stopped due to corruption/inept umpiring. Who knows.   

Anyway, many thanks to Wang Weilin for his informative tour of the Beida campus.

Beijing University's pagoda.

Stray cat no.1

Stray cat no.2

Ice skating on Beida's frozen lake (yes. It is that cold)

A Beijing sunset over the lake.

Beida has numerous resident stray cats, we saw one such clowder of cats being fed by an old lady. It was wonderful to see that some stereotypes exist world over, and old cat ladies endure regardless of culture. If I fail my degree, this is what I will become.

I’m afraid this is where my pictures end, but don’t worry, the story continues. After the Beida jaunt, we headed to a Christmas carol service. The congregation was surprisingly diverse, so much so that the orchestra even had a pair of bongoes playing along to ‘Away in a Manger’. The service also made me remember why Christmas in China isn’t a spiritual phenomenon, and why Father Christmas (or ‘the Old Man of Christmas’, 圣诞老人 as the Chinese call him) is the face of the holiday in China. According to one of my Chinese friends, the Chinese government sent messages to all domestic universities instructing them to discourage their students from celebrating Christmas. For a secular country, particularly a secular country with the experience of the Taiping rebellion, it is only natural for them to want to damper interest in Christianity. However, this doesn’t stop all of the shops from pasting the chubby, rosy-cheeked image of Santa Claus bedecked with glitter onto their doors and windows. It is very strange, as most Chinese neither celebrate nor understand Christmas, what would be the benefit of buying specific Christmas decorations? My guess is it has to be purely financial, trying to entice people into Christmas spending akin to the West. Father Christmas just happens to be detached enough from the Nativity story and a symbol of Christmas commercialism, making him the perfect Christmas ambassador to China. With jolly St. Nick on the scene, Chinese people don’t notice the fact that Christmas is “Christ’s Mass”, a Christian celebration. Not that many Westerners do nowadays either. 

Anyway, that night I ate a tasty Korean meal in someone’s front room, then proceeded to throw it all up again in the small hours of the night. There seemed to be a virus going around, as a few of my other classmates had a similar vomiting bug just before I arrived. This whole affair put a stopper on my Christmas eve, as I spent the whole day in bed. 

Then suddenly, Christmas day arrived! Kate and Danni’s Beijing flat had a heartwarming abundance of tinsel. While at home, I regarded the sparkly ropes as tacky and cheap, but never before have I been so glad and so emotional to see those garlands of plastic. It will probably never happen again. This was my first Christmas morning where the emphasis wasn’t on opening presents, the reason being that nobody really had any presents. Instead we sat around sharing our own family Christmas day traditions. Although the memories were warming, it was a lonely prospect knowing that today the closest we were going to get to our families was a skype call. 

One thing I was looking forward to was our Christmas meal, as for once it didn’t involve my mother brooding alone in the kitchen. I didn’t even have to set the table. We had booked a Christmas day brunch buffet at the Ritz-Carlton. Some poor guy in England got this, but for £2 more we were able to get a 5 star buffet. I do love China sometimes. For added merriment, we brought along our own Christmas crackers, and walked around the buffet tables proudly sporting paper crowns. Unfortunately, I was still suffering from a diminished appetite. Nevertheless, I managed to eat spinach and watercress soup as a starter, followed up by lobster. Then I moved on the sashimi accompanied by salad and olives. This was succeeded by my 'Christmas' course of a single roast potato (I was getting full) and Yorkshire puddings. I have never seen people's faces light up as much as Kate and Danni's as when they saw Yorkshire puddings, it was a mixture of utter joy and disbelief. I also ate some spicy Szechuan style cod, and then some salmon. Mmm fish. 

We rounded off the day by watching Love Actually, and Dredd... Don't watch Dredd, it's a terrible film. Thanks to the Chinese censors, Love Actually had been cut in several places, often mid-sentence, and the entire storyline with Martin Freeman was edited out until the very last scene, which for Chinese viewers must be very confusing. I would also like to add that I ate an entire Lindt chocolate Santa Claus while watching the films, as my present to myself. Ami, where ever you are right now, I hope you're proud of me. 

Some time later... it was my birthday :3 yaaaay. 

Qing Dao Merrily on High 青岛圣诞喜洋洋

 Well, if anyone out there is dying to know how I spent December 2012 gearing up for the festive season in a foreign land, now you can find out! Hello? Is anybody there? Didn’t think so. Meh.

Ooh-la-la. The Shangri-la's fancy pants tree. 

So, step one for holiday hype: decorations. Obviously, I lack the resources of the Shangri-la, and could only marvel in awe and jealousy at their huge (and damn classy for China) Christmas tree. With the search and destroy machine called Heimdall roaming my apartment, a tree was out of the question. So, I contented myself with a baubles from all the door handles and hanging decoration on my front door. 

I wish you all understood how happy dangly things make me. 

This is the origami advent calendar I made for our classroom. Instead of sweets, I used Christmas jokes, because you never know what sneaky sweet-toothed thief could be roaming the foreign students department (namely Will). The best jokes I could find were; ‘How does King Wenceslas like his pizza?’, ‘Deep-pan, crisp and even’, and, ‘What illness do you get from eating Christmas decorations?’, ‘tinselitus’. Sorry everybody, I'll stop now :( 

What do you call an elf who has just won the lottery? Welfy

Then, a week or so before Christmas, it snowed! Festive atmosphere: tick. I literally went into Christmas hyperdrive and walked around singing 'White Christmas' to myself. Here's some photos of Heimdall in the snow.

   

So, what's missing? Cake. Lots of Cake. So I made a Tiramisu, which must have ended up costing £10 a portion, because all the ingredients had to be imported. Because I lack an oven, make a tiramisu, they said, it will be easy, they said. I kept my flatmate up until 3am with my whisking. I'm a terrible person. But I'm a terrible person who can make a delicious tiramisu, remember that.

Sorry, it ended up looking like a bowl of soil.

 

Ingredients:
6 egg yolks
230g white sugar
300g marscapone cheese
500ml whipping cream
80ml coffee flavoured liqueur (or more...)
Ladyfingers
5g cocoa powder for dusting
30g chocolate

1. Combine egg yolks and sugar over boiling water on low heat, cook for 10mins stirring constantly. Remove from heat and whisk until thick and lemon coloured.

2. Add marscapone to whipped yolks. Beat until combined. In separate bowl, whip cream to stiff peaks, then fold into yolk mixture.

3. Line large bowl with ladyfingers, then douse with coffee liqueur. Spoon half of the cream filling over the ladyfingers, then repeat ladyfingers, coffee liqueur and filling layers. Use a vegetable peeler on the chocolate to make chocolate curls. Garnish Tiramisu with cocoa powder and chocolate curls.

4. Refrigerate for several hours, then consume. Nom nom.

  

Alice and I posing with our birthday tiramisu. Candles were in danger of sinking into the cream.

Candles gone... we also look like victims of crime. 

Blowing out the candles....