At first I thought my students gifted me several apples on our last class before Christmas because I'm a teacher and well, it's a tradition in the West to give teachers apples. After carrying home my elaborately wrapped apples, I did some research and discovered that this was actually a very Chinese custom. You see, in Chinese, Christmas Eve is called Ping An Ye (calm, quiet night), and apples are called ping guo. So the word for apple sounds like the word for Christmas Eve, so people give apples as gifts! Very clever. You can also buy more expensive apples that have been grown with black stickers on them so the characters 平安 (ping an) show up light colored on the peel. Very very clever.
On Ping An Ye, we headed out to Shapingba to get together with friends for pizza and to watch the Chinese Christmas Eve spectacle we had heard so much about from the China 15's (the group of volunteers here who are now in their second year - we are called China 16's). Apparently Chinese college kids get together in the entertainment districts, buy plastic inflatable hammers and bats, glow in the dark accessories, and flashing rabbit ear/Santa Claus/devil horn headbands and proceed to beat each other silly. Foreigners become particularly desirable targets. However, when we arrived there seemed to be more police than holiday revelers, so we shrugged our shoulders and proceeded to stuff ourselves with pizza. As we moved from the pizza buffet to the bar, a few scouts went out to see if there was any inflatable weapon action to be had outside. Apparently not, as the police were confiscating inflatable toys and stomping them on the pavement. Nothing like celebrating Christmas by destroying toys! They had seemingly decided that only the Jiefangbei district in the city center could celebrate "calm, quiet night" with inflatable pandemonium. No matter. We enjoyed hearing stories about last years craziness from a couple of 15's and watching our friends take ultra-spicy "pepper shots" which according to those who tried it, was like drinking shots of alcoholic pepper spray. Only one or two folks were able to stomach it without running to the bathroom to wretch it out. Our friend Chris described it as "an instant ulcer." Not fun to try, but fun to watch others try!
On Christmas Day, we awoke late with our house strangely warm with the heat of three extra sleeping bodies (our apartment averages about 50 F inside these days). After wishing the folks back home a happy Christmas Eve over Skype, we woke our sleeping friends with coffee, hot cocoa, pomelo, and a veggie-sausage scramble. Two more friends arrived, we opened our presents from home, and then headed out to the first of two Christmas parties we were set to attend. Since there were seven of us at this point, we all took a bus across the river, then realized that the postal college was a bit far out of the way and that south of the Yangtze, the bus system was not as familiar to us, so we decided it was time to hop into two cabs. Laden with two pies, I hopped into the first cab, leaving Richy (laden with 4 liters of homemade gingerale) Leo and Katie D. to catch another. 30 minutes into our cab ride, I called Richy to see where they were: still where we left them, as every other cab didn't seem to want to drive three foreigners up a mountain (as sometimes happens here). We arrived to find that everyone had been waiting for us to eat (we were a couple hours late at this point), but it would still be another hour and a half before the Richy, Leo and Katie D. contingent made it. When they finally arrived with the help of some students, we hungrily set in to the lovely spread of spaghetti, penne pesto pasta, real salad (with ranch dressing!), and garlic bread. The highlights were the fresh grated Parmesan cheese, followed by an amazing array of desserts including cookies, pies, sweet steamed bread and real ice cream. I literally haven't been so full since our China going away party.
Our next stop, on the same side of the river, was a party at our friend Kit's, which quickly turned into a strange Santa hat dance party. Santa hats cost only about one kuai here, which is like 14 cents, so somehow we all acquired several from students and other foreign teachers (Richy and I somehow ended up with five). It was a good way to follow up eating ourselves into oblivion, and I am pretty sure I broke even on the calories after about 4 hours of dancing. Needless to say, we slept in the following morning, and somehow found the energy in the afternoon not only to hike down to Chongqing Tiandi (a new billion dollar development at the bottom of the Jialing River bank near our house) but also to head out to Yongchuan (about an hour outside the city) to visit our friend Amy and share our Christmas chocolates with her.
It was an intense weekend, which we're still recovering from, but staying busy was the only way not to get bummed about not being home for Christmas. Now we're looking forward to a trip up to Xi'an next weekend for the New Year weekend!
Happy Holidays!
~Katie
PS.
Here is a link to a recent article in the New York Times about our fair city of Chongqing! If you are planning to visit us here it provides a good tourist perspective on "A Chinese City for Chinese People:"
http://travel.nytimes.com/2010/12/26/travel/26chongqing.html?pagewanted=1
No comments:
Post a Comment