A Very Cherry Beijing New Year
Pictures taken December 29, 2005 - January 1, 2006
Some images courtesy of Jennykins

When you live on the Pacific rim of Asia, the possibilities for travel are endless. You're a stones throw away from any number of glorious and/or poverty stricken nations, and you will inevitably want to visit and debaucherize them all. Sadly, the cruel demands of the hagwon workplace keep you superglued to the front of the classroom, save for, of course, the much-anticipated holiday long weekends. For New Year's Day, that magical chasm between one year and the next, Korea was forced to retract its tentacles and allow us our freedom.

And so, we thought, what better way to celebrate freedom than to visit a genuinely repressive socialist state, that rising Eastern tiger known affectionately as 'China'? It would be deliciously ironic, sorta like celebrating one's release from jail by immediately setting five panda bears on fire and then spray-painting their charred fur with slogans like "Fur Is Murder!" and "PETA 4EVER". Is that ironic? I don't really know what irony is, but I'm pretty sure it has something to do with pandas.

Anyway, the prospect of New Year's in Beijing tickled us heaps plenty. There would be lantern parades... firework shows of epic proportions... a bunch of Chinese guys wearing a dragon costume and falling all over each other... and then we realized that New Year's is not really New Year's in China. See, they have this thing called Chinese New Year's, which is Lunar and not Solar, and infinitely more important in China than Regular New Year's. That's why they call it Chinese New Year's. It's from China. They don't worship the sun as we do, the dirty heathens. So we figured they probably wouldn't have much interest in our silly little foreigner 2005-turning-into-2006 rituals, but hey: vacation time is vacation time. We were going to Beijing, dammit.

Chad rustled us up a package deal for about $750 each - four days and three nights, including flights, food, hotel and all kinds of tourist-y entrance fees. With limited time and a miniscule grasp of Mandarin at our disposal (nee-how - "hello", and shia shia - "thank you", and chee-fay ler - "I'm high!", and nee see-hwun bay un-mor ma? - "Do you want a massage?") a tour was our best bet for actually seeing stuff and not getting lost out in some rice fields. We were good to go.

On a fateful December morn we effortlessly caught the shuttle to Incheon International Airport and it was then, as you may surmise, that the Chinese Adventure-a-thon truly began.

Here we are at the Incheon International Airport! An "airport" is a big huge place where "airplanes" arrive and depart from distant corners of the world! Some airports are fancy and some are dingy, but an airport will always sell you duty-free items and little souvenirs of whatever country you happen to be leaving from, so you can buy last minute presents when you realize that you totally forgot to buy presents. Little flags are always a big hit, as are nationalist shot glasses and nationalist coffee mugs and nationalist post cards of picturesque locations that you didn't really visit but it's okay to pretend. In this particular airport, Matt is reading Time Magazine and I am learning how to ask where the slave markets are in Mandarin.

The airplane we took to Beijing was very much an ordinary airplane so it doesn't warrant much description. The flight attendants could all speak English, Hangul and Mandarin, which mildly impressed me. Our flight was packed with a fat amount of other foreigners, all ESL teachers, who apparently had the same escape plans as us. I fell asleep because I was hung over and - POW - we were suddenly landing and there were a whirlwind of customs forms to fill out ensuring that we weren't bringing subversive materials (books, videos or pamphlets) designed to harm Chinese happiness or ideology into the country. The authorities were also quite inquisitive as to whether we had Bird Flu or thought we had any symptoms of Bird Flu, such as "dementia". Jen, in fact, did have Bird Flu but totally lied on her form. Wheee!

In the airport, we collected our bags and wandered out into a sea of signs. Most of the signs were in crazy Mandarin script, so it was pretty much assumed that their bearers weren't looking for us. We found a shortish, bald man displaying a bevy of English names and whoa, our names were there! Clemens, Christopher. I've never had anyone holding a sign with my name on it at an airport, and felt a mild thrill. Yet another life accomplishment to check off the To-Do list. Now I just need to eat seventy-three womens' leather shoes in a single sitting and I'll be a True Winner in Life!

But not yet. Back in China, shortish man led us, along with a sizeable number of other whiteys from our flight, out of the airport, walking quickly and vigorously brandishing a sky-blue flag as a beacon against a roiling yellow sea of humanity. Outside, my first impressions of China were "Huh. Looks a lot like Korea." I guess when you've seen one Asian country aglow in neon and strange symbols, the rest don't take you by surprise quite as easily. We filed onto our bus, which was very bus-like, and herein lay a tragedy: my camera was safely locked away inside my suitcase, which was safely locked away behind many other suitcases in the baggage compartment. The camera was so fucking safe that it would never see the light of day! Okay, so this wasn't really a tragedy and it's really quite a piece of shit camera anyway but its absence meant I had to nudge and kick Jen into taking pictures that turned me on. She was an excellent surrogate, and I came to love her with the zeal that a Manchurian emperor feels for his court photographer... or calligrapher... or whatever. The good pictures are all hers.

So we tooled along in our toolish tour bus and marveled at Chinese cars and Chinese buildings and Chinese signs, which were all very Chinese. I was particularly tickled by the many Armoured Bicycles we saw, which looked like nothing more than unlucky fellows in a three-wheeled dinky tin box, zooming along, rocking precariously from side to side and wobbling through the steel jaws of rush hour hell. Their blind spots must've been tremendous and I'm genuinely sorry I didn't get to see one struck by an automobile and sent, end over end, into a nearby ditch. The Armoured Bicycles were clearly a vehicle of natural selection; the late Chairman Mao's last stab at controlling the burgeoning Chinese population. An insidious and yet genius invention. Don't buy one if they come out back home.

Anyway, the picture above clearly has nothing to do with suicidal bike-boxes and that's because it's pretty damn hard to take photos out of a bus window while the driver is cutting lanes and yelling and honking his horn wildly into the mad throngs of Beijing traffic. Let's just forget about the Armoured Bicycles for now, okay? You're not gonna get to see them, so it's best to move on.

The picture is, in fact, of the Temple of Heaven which was the first stop on our mad dash through the Chinese tourism belt. And what a dash it turned out to be! The second we tumbled off the bus, wide-eyed and shell shocked, we were accosted by masses of peasantry trying to sell us all manner of trinkets. They swept us off our feet, these desperate, calculated hawkers, and it soon became clear that they were well-experienced in the fine old art of Fleecing Foreigners. Old ladies trailed us down the hallways, peddling postcards and feathery hackeysacks and shouting ever-decreasing figures of money in our ears:

Decrepit Grandmother: "FIFTY YUAN!" (Note: Yuan is Chinese for 'most honorable bling-blang')

Chris, petrified with fear of the elderly and a distinct lack of desire for postcards or whatever it is she has clutched in her withered paw, shakes his head no thank you.

DG: "Okay okay, THIRTY YUAN! Where you from?"

Chris: "Canada."

DG: "Canada good! You, me, friend. Special discount! TEN YUAN!!"

Chris: "Guh?"

DG, screaming feverishly: "ONE AMERICAN DOLLAR ONLY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

Chris: "Fuck, Christ, okay, just go away alright?"

DG: "THREE FOR ONE CANADA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

So basically I ended up with three garishly feathered hackeysacks for ONE AMERICAN DOLLAR ONLY and trust me, if I had transcribed the whole bartering process in which Decrepit Grandmother lowered her price incrementally each time I said no, you'd be reading until the Apocalypse. The harassment was tenacious, like that of a particularly drunken frat-boy rapist, and I was reeling in shock as my ancient new friend abruptly turned heel to pursue a new victim.

Wasn't this meant to be a socialist country, an incubator for communism and revolutionary idealism stretching far beyond the common lust for the dollar? I suppose, in a way, parting Westerners from their cash and feeding the Dragoneconomy is a rather patriotic thing for a Chinese vendor to do, but at the time I couldn't help but gawp. I felt like I had been cheated: my perception that maybe things were radically different somewhere, anywhere, had been shattered. The dollar clearly reigned supreme worldwide and I was clearly a very stupid person for daydreaming otherwise. Plus I had bought three hackeysacks somehow. What the fuck?

In time I learnt to deal better with the vocal peddlers of nothingness, but for the moment I consoled myself by watching an old man scrape away on his crude instrument while a woman by his side wailed plaintively in song. We were also encouraged to buy some tiny birds to look at, or eat. Fortunately for the birds our tour guide efficiently swept us away, blue flag a-bobbin, and we were off to see some temples or palaces or something.

There he goes: Mr. David, the shepherd of wallets.

And there we are! I would like nothing more than to explain what all these buildings are and, more importantly, what they were, but I'm sure it will suffice to say that they were for emperor-type rituals and probably orgies. Also I wasn't really listening to the tour. I was kicking my hackeysack at Chad.

I speculated wildly about some of the displays: "Did you notice that all the sacrifice urns to dark forces - the moon, night, thunderstorms - were held in the Western gatehouse? They've always thought the West was evil!" And then I realized that I was delusional.

So we trekked up onto the alter to check out the hullabaloo, and I insolently perched myself atop the keystone that had long been used as a pulpit for Chinese emperors to address his hordes of adorers. Rumour had it that the stone has the magical power to amplify one's voice, but I think you need to know the Windows password or something because it didn't really work for me. Also Jen cropped the actual stone out of her picture.

By this time Mr. David was freaking out because some of our group were lagging behind, photographing meticulously, and the flock was hurriedly gathered and herded towards our bus. I fought my way through fierce droves of determined merchants at the exit and was almost in the clear, sans purchase, when a guy bleeding enthusiasm followed me for over 100 metres, clutching a one-string fiddle just like the old man had been playing earlier. I somehow bought it for a dollar-fifty (down from $200) by talking nonsense English, saying things like "Canada fiddly goo-goo!" as the price dropped.

Finally we had promenaded far enough. He shoved his garbage instrument at me and I shoved my spare change at him and we had a moment, standing there in the filthy streets, an understanding of what it truly means to be engaged in senseless capitalism. I wonder about him still, out there in the urban wilds with his dozens of mass-produced pieces of shit, hurling them into the hands of nonplussed tourists. I boarded the bus and gleefully treated everyone to a horrible cacophony of screeching by dragging the bow painfully across the string of my newly-acquired monstrosity. It's not music. It's not even close. It looks sorta like a kids' Indian bow & arrow set jammed into a croquet mallet, painted by an art class of kindergarten students with no arms. Best buck-fifty I ever spent.

Anyway, we said goodbye to the Temple of Heaven and its robber-demons and were off to dinner, to beautify the DaiJiaCun traditional restaurant with our foreign graces and newly-bestowed bold type.

To be continued...