Chinese New Year 2012

It’s nearly a month or so since my last blog entry so if there is anyone out there remotely interested in my life in Beijing then I’m glad to ease your anticipation or any curiosity you may have by keeping this thing up to date.

Chinese New Year was spent down in Zhaoqing, Guangdong province which was certainly a nice get away to warmer weather, cleaner skies and awesome food for a good couple of weeks. I could tell I was in a small city in South China again not only by being a giant ginger beacon among the clouds thus being subject to being stared at, but also due to the various billboards of a model dressed as Princess Diana wearing nothing but a bra and panties in a sneaky attempt promote women’s lingerie for a local store. Bemusing, though above all tabloid dynamite for those wonderful institutions The Sun and The Daily Mail wishing to pray on people potentially disgusted by such blasphemy. Diana controversies aside, I spent most of my time down there being fed like a spoilt kid by Simone’s family, and feeling as if I had just arrived in a foreign country once again, sitting down nodding and smiling like a good foreigner who has no clue as to what is going on. This was largely due to there being both Cantonese and Hakka (which, disappointingly is not a language derived from the New Zealand rugby team’s pregame war chant) dialects drowning the Chino-airwaves around me, and despite having a decent understanding of the former, my ability to express myself has yet to reach any form of communication save for a few yeses and no’s here and there. Cantonese is also one of those languages where if you make one slight error in pronunciation you can either end up bemusing or offending someone, which I discovered outside a dim sum restaurant in Guangzhou telling a waitress to “die” after attempting to thank her.

Diana in darker days

Still it was a good holiday, and apart from being generally lazy and soaking up the lovely surrounding karst mountain landscape, it was great to meet up with old friends Matt and Joe, and our reunion was celebrated none better than hitting the city’s finest nightclub “The Cave”, in which we were reminded the wrong doings of the fine art that is wooing scantily dressed dancers by some Indian and Chinese clientele.

After a manic 2 weeks of working the typical English training centre winter course slog, I’ve got back into the swing of things in Beijing which involves being squashed on buses and subways, dodging multi-directional incoming phlegm (human) tiptoeing my way around litter and fag-ends (human caused) and hop scotching above and over scattered faeces (human?) decorating the pavement on the walk home from the bus stop. It’s interesting how these things really don’t bother me at all and seem only trivial in my life perspective here in Beijing. I’m not sure if I should thank a more liberal and accepting attitude that has come from travelling and living abroad, or being plain desensitised to all this stuff which I’m sure would have had me ranting a couple of years ago. It still does on occasion, however somewhere amid all this dirt and calamity I am still enjoying myself in the red capital, and am furiously writing letters to Mr. Hu requesting him to sort out the spitting in lieu of a possible parental visit in the summer. 

Welcome to the concrete jungle, we got smog and dust

Anyway it’s a short one this time, as I am clearly far more focused on the outcome of this Mr. Xi and his visit to America in hope of achieving such deep relations between the two countries so that they create a giant slide between America and China for people to conveniently use to travel between the two countries.