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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| Beijing University's pagoda. |
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| Stray cat no.1 |
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| Stray cat no.2 |
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| Ice skating on Beida's frozen lake (yes. It is that cold) |
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| A Beijing sunset over the lake. |
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.
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