I just woke up and ran straight to my computer because I can’t wait to tell you about last night. Wowza! What a night it was!! So fun, and exciting, and LOUD… and very special because we were able to spend such and important holiday with a very sweet local family. I should point out to you that it is really a huge honor to be invited into someone’s home like we were. Imagine if you invited some foreigners that you barely knew into your home to share your family Christmas. Same thing. Yes, it was a real honor.

So, New Year’s Eve can be summed up with 3 words: Family, Food, and FIREWORKS!!! I write that last one in capital letters because I promise, you have never seen fireworks like these. I know I hadn’t. As a matter of fact, the experience was so insane, that I decided to capture it on video instead of trying to describe it to you. Words will not do last night justice.

Family: Like I said before, this is China’s biggest holiday of the year, and one to be celebrated with family. In most homes, families will gather around the TV to watch a 4 hour long variety show called The Spring Festival Gala. About a billion people watch this program every year. In my opinion, this is true for 3 reasons:

1) it is produced by the government and therefore shown on every channel

2) since it has been airing for over 30 years, it has become a tradition

3) propaganda goes really well with fireworks.

Food: Chinese dumplings are one of the most important foods of Chinese New Year. Since the shape of the dumpling is similar to ancient Chinese gold or silver ingots, they symbolize wealth. Traditionally, the members of a family get together to make dumplings during the New Year’s Eve (now, while watching the Gala). Very traditional families may hide a coin in one of the dumplings. The person who finds the coin is supposed to have good fortune in the New Year.

After making the dumplings, we sat down to a feast of local Qingdao seafood.

That last dish is made of sticky rice and is topped with the Chinese character, Fu, a character which pops up alot during the Festival. Most families hang a large paper Fu upside down on their front door. This is the only time when a Chinese character is written upside down on purpose. Why?? Because the Fu character means lucky or good fortune.  In Chinese, saying “fu dao le” (foo-dow-luh) means “luck or fortune has arrived”. But the word “dao” can also mean to fall down or turn upside-down. So, literally turning the character Fu upside-down is a play on words implying fortune has arrived. Pretty cool, huh?

Fireworks: A little background… The legend goes that every New Year, a man-eating sea monster called Nian (which coincidentally means “year”) shows up to attack the villagers and kill their livestock. The bright lights and loud noises of the fireworks are said to scare him away.

There is also a tradition involving burning money in the streets for your dead ancestors. I’m still a little fuzzy on this one because they obviously don’t burn real money, and I’m not sure why dead people need money anyway. Maybe by next year I’ll have this one figured out (but at least this sort of explains the men building a fire in the road on the video).

The experience is impossible to explain. Just watch the video. Things to remember as you are watching:

1) Anyone, anywhere can shoot fireworks, so they are going off in every direction. Literally thousands of people are shooting fireworks at the same time around the city. You are surrounded by fire, and noise, and chaos. Thus, the screaming (mine).

2) The fireworks go on ALL night, and continue throughout the entire festival. Yes, 10 days. Some people I know that have been living here for years, now leave China during the holiday just to escape the noise!

3) The Chinese invented fireworks. Don’t know if that is really relevant to the video, but I thought I needed a third point. I blame my Southern Baptist roots.

I know the video is a bit lengthy, but I think that if you watch the whole thing you will get a taste of what the night was like for us. Again, WOWZA!!

Bo and I are officially on vacation!

Yippeeeee!

A full 10 days off work!

Yahooooo!!

Okay, enough rubbing it in.

I am really looking forward to lots of blogging over the next week as Spring Festival unfolds. We have many exciting things planned during our time off this week, including going skiing and holding a Catan night at our apartment. I know that some people might not share our excitement about Catan night, but trust me, it’s exciting if you belong to our family.

So, more later…for now, I am off to bake my 3rd batch of muffins. During the Festival, when you visit friends, you must always go bearing gifts. And the homemade kind are the best!

Bo and I both had a few clothing items that needed repairing. Hems and what-not. And since I am in no way the domestic goddess that I wish I was, I couldn’t quite handle these things myself. I asked around, and found out about a little tailor shop in the mall close to our apartment.

We took our stuff in, and were shocked when the lady took the items and immediately began fixing them. While we waited! And she was so incredibly quick! I think we were standing there for 10 minutes max (including the time it took to pay).

The pants cost fifty cents to hem, and my dress that needed to be taken down a size cost about a dollar fifty. Love it! I couldn’t help thinking about the 8 pairs of pants that I had hemmed for $10-15 each right before I came here.

I think it is safe to say that I am going to be ruined for life after living here. I’m officially spoiled by the cheapness.

A few weeks ago, I went to the hair salon. The winter weather is so dry here that my hair has been full of static electricity. It is so embarrassing! I’ll take off my scarf, and my hair will just go crazy, sticking out all over the place! I had been avoiding hair salons like the plague out of sheer terror, but I finally broke down and went in for a deep conditioning treatment. I was told that this would help with the static.

My friend Ava accompanied me and served as my translator/advisor/shoulder to cry on should anything go terribly wrong…

And she also convinced me to get a little trim since she took me to “her guy” who is supposedly one of the top 10 stylists in Qingdao. Things went okay. He didn’t butcher my hair, although he did tell me that my hair was REALLY hard for him to cut due to the fact that “Westerners have different shaped heads than Chinese.” Hm, never knew.

After the cut, I had the deep conditioning which felt really good. I looked like an alien, though. They covered my hair with this thick green mud, and then put a silver pouch on my head. Next, they connected tubes that ran from a big machine straight into the pouch (on my head). Once they turned on the machine, the pouch filled with steam, and here you go:

Lovely, I know. It did help the static problem, though. And I think it is worth mentioning that my haircut, wash & dry, deep conditioning, a 30 minute massage, AND the silk smoothing balm that I couldn’t resist buying all cost less than half of what I would pay for just a cut in the States.

Jealous??

Chinese New Year is exactly one week away. This is HUGE here in China, and kicks off the 10 day holiday referred to as “Spring Festival.” All of the hustle and bustle around here reminds me of the US during Christmas. And since China obviously doesn’t doesn’t celebrate any religious holidays, I guess this is sort of their holiday equivalent. Oh, if only our government gave us 10 days off work to remember Christ’s birth…

In China, all holidays are referred to as “festivals” and there is an insanely large number of them each year. Some of them are only remembered/celebrated by the older generation as the youngsters have traded in some of these old traditions for more “western” holidays, like halloween (aren’t we proud?). And as some of the Chinese festivals may soon completely disappear (because the new generation fails to keep them alive), I think that most of the young people can at least still name all of the holidays, even if they can’t tell you why their grandparents observe them. My, how I wish that my students could have explained the meaning of the “Tomb Sweeping Festival” or the “Bathing and Basking Festival.”

So anyway, Spring Festival is an exciting holiday, packed full of tradition. So packed, in fact, that one week before the big day, most families have a “Small Spring Festival” so that they can actually relax and enjoy the family togetherness. This would be like having a small Christmas dinner a week before Christmas to remember His birth before “Christmas” took over and distracted everyone with all of our many traditional activities. Not a bad idea, I think.

Bo and I are blessed to have been invited to spend the New Year (the Chinese use a lunar calender) with our dear friend, Diana, and her family. I am so excited about participating in all of the ancient traditions that go along with this festive time of year. Especially learning to make dumplings. I can’t wait for that. Mmmmm.

Starting on New Year’s Day, January 26th (which also happens to be my birthday!), I plan to post details of what happens each day during the festival. I’m excited about learning/sharing about the deep cultural traditions involved in welcoming 2009, the year of the ox!

Loved the skinny Chinese Santa and how you could always see lots of black hair beneath his hat. Also, what’s with the empty sack? So telling.

I’m still stumped over the identity of those other two characters, though. *??*

China definitely rolled out the Christmas red carpet for foreigners. Obviously, a purely business decision, they made every effort to persuade us to spend, spend, spend as if we were at home. To quote my friend Jo, by late October “it looked like [bulimic] Santa threw up all over” downtown Qingdao.

But I think that even with the trees towering, the lights sparkling, and the carols blaring from department store speakers, we were all thinking the same thing…

“when it comes to Christmas, these people are clueless.”

Here is a picture of our Christmas tree. It is a live tree made of lucky bamboo.

This is sort of a repeat for those of you on facebook, but WE GOT SNOW!!!

Being from the American South (where schools close for flurries), this is a pretty big deal. We were so excited to wake up Sunday morning to a real winter wonderland. Of course, we immediately bundled up and ran outside with our cameras, filled with hometown paranoia that it would all disappear by lunchtime.

It has been a full 3 days now and things are still white around here, by the way.

Lots of families were outside building snowmen. The kids were all so cute and proud of their creations. Our neighbors said that although it snows quite a bit in Qingdao, the first snow is always the best consistency for building a snowman. Hmm, good to know.

By the end of our photo session, I was freezing! I don’t think I have every been so cold in my life, but I’m not complaining. It was beautiful, and it looks like we are heading for a white Christmas in China.

You know that saying, “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks?” Well, I am living proof of that little adage. I started my Chinese language lessons a couple of weeks ago and it is REALLY difficult. First of all, the language uses sounds that never come out of our mouths in English and my tongue is really confused. Second, the language uses “tones” for each syllable. So depending on how you “sing” the syllable, it can have up to five meanings. (The word ‘ma’ can mean mother or horse. oops!) And lastly, I’m just old…and you know, new tricks and all…

So in order not to go crazy and throw my Chinese book off the balcony, I have learned to appreciate small victories when it comes to this new challenge.

We moved into our new apartment recently (more on that later), and for weeks, I have been trying to tell the taxi driver how to take me home (in Mandarin). Every time I attempted the 4 character name of my complex, the driver would look at me with a huge question mark above his head, and I would resort to plan B…pointing.

Not wanting to let the language win, I continued with this routine day after day. Always trying, always failing…until this week. I jumped into the cab and said Jin Hai Guang Chang (with appropriate tonage, of course), and held my breath waiting for the quizzical stare. But alas! He just gave me a quick nod, and drove me straight home! Woohoo!!

Now, on to perfecting “where’s the bathroom.”

Last week, during a lower level English class, I presented my students with a simple question, “if you had 10 million RMB, what would you buy?” One student said he would buy a hotel. One said she would travel around the world. The last student to answer the question said that he would buy a car. So of course I asked him what kind of car he would buy, expecting him to say something to the effect of Ferrari or Lamborghini.

He said he would buy a Buick. Go figure.

This is my first Thanksgiving…

…alone. And by alone, I do mean alone. Bo had to fly back to the States for visa issues and work, so I’m here in China, alone, on Thanksgiving.

…to work. Can you believe that?!? My school had the nerve to make me work on Thanksgiving day! Who cares that the holiday is ONLY celebrated in my country? I still have rights, don’t I? Okay, maybe not.

…to eat duck instead of turkey. I spent a lovely evening with my fellow teachers, eating Beijing Duck. It definitely didn’t stack up to a good ole turkey dinner, but it was the best we could come up with. It had a beak, so close enough for China.

All in all, it was just another day. Nothing special. But I think maybe this year I am more thankful than ever before. Thankful for the opportunity to live in this crazy country for awhile. Thankful for a husband who is worth it. Thankful that I am an American and can always move back. Thankful for our wonderful families who do everything they can to help and support us, even from 8000 miles away. Thankful for a job that almost didn’t happen and a place to live. Thankful for like-minded friends/neighbors who have done so much for us already and who will help me get through the next 2+ week alone. Thankful, thankful, thankful. To Him, of course. 

By the way…HAPPY BIRTHDAY NANNA!!! I am thankful for you, too! Sorry I’m a day late, but I sent good thoughts your way yesterday!

If you ever visit China, be sure to eat at least one meal at a hot pot restaurant. Sort of like Chinese fondue!

You start out with hot oil, you get to choose 2 different flavors that basically determine the level of spiciness-we ordered one plain (white) and one medium spicy (red). I was with a girlfriend, so I actually got to sample both flavors. If I had been with Bo, I wouldn’t have been able to eat the burn-your-tastebuds-off spicy oil that he would have ordered.

As the oil heats up, and slowly comes to a boil, the servers bring the meat and veggies to the table. My friend wanted me to try EVERYTHING, so the food kept coming, and coming, and coming. It was hilarious!

Once the oil starts boiling, you just start dumping stuff in. After a few minutes of cooking… bon appetit!

Note: I have always loved vegetables, and since I have been here, I have discovered a whole new world of veggies that I never knew existed. I didn’t realize that we Americans were so deprived!!