The Tomb Cleaning Festival

I realise that my title sounds pretty grim, but I'll endeavour to make this post anything but morbid! The tomb cleaning festival ("sao mu" - to my Chinese speaking friends), is an occasion when Chinese families visit and clean the tombs of their relatives. There's more history/meaning behind it but I'm too ill-informed to give you any decent idea of what it involves. So the result of all this tomb-cleaning was that I got a 3 day weekend!!

Friday evening was very low-key and civilised. It started with the Mum teaching me how to make "jiaozi" (Chinese dumplings). I feel like I'm becoming more and more Chinese - eating Chinese food for every meal, drinking Chinese tea, studying Kung Fu, and now learning how to make jiaozi.

We had a bit of a laugh when she said that my jiaozi were "sleeping" - they were all falling over instead of standing up properly. They tasted good though!



After this, I went to a friend's house for a couple of much-deserved cold beers. The whole week, I'd been working hard, and these felt like the reward for all the hours spent learning characters. As I said, the night was quite low-key, and I was in bed by 1.

On Saturday morning, I slept in, watched some stupid TV programmes on the internet, and pretty much did nothing of any note. I had a Kung Fu lesson in the afternoon which was quite intense. This lesson, I saw what my teachers were actually capable of - one broke a punch bag (!!) by kicking it repeatedly, and the other did about 15 backflips in a row! I was in awe!

From there, I went to a bar to watch the football. The less said about this the better, but I did meet a few other Spurs fans which is always a pleasure! Having drowned my sorrows, while watching Arsenal and Chelsea both trounce their opposition, we made our way to another club. The club was called Bling, and as implied, this meant the usual blend of commercial RnB music, gaudy decor (a Bentley complete with spinning rims made up the DJ booth) and expensive drinks. I got home at the sociable hour of 4am.

By Sunday, I had both a headache and a desire to do something other than consuming warm Chinese lager, so I got a few friends together to visit a mountain village 2 hours outside of Beijing. This village - Chuandixia - was built around 200 years ago, and still retained many of its 'Hutong' style buildings (houses with all of the individual rooms built around a courtyard). We had to take a number of winding mountain roads to reach the village, and we were equipped with the obligatory crazy Chinese driver. If we hadn't felt fragile from the previous night, everyone was feeling pretty worse for wear by the time we reached Chuandixia.

The weather was fantastic, and we spent the first couple of hours walking around. Initially, some helpful Chinese person had told us that if we climbed the mountain, we would be able to find rooms to stay in. This later turned out to be false(!) and we thankfully met some people halfway up who told us this wasn't the case! At about 5, we decided to look for somewhere to stay. Most of the buildings took the form of Hutongs, and were basically impromptu guesthouses/ restaurants. We found a place with a decent courtyard, clean facilities, and relatively friendly staff, all for the princely sum of 20RMB per person (About GBP2 each). We all slept on one huge traditional 'Kang' bed (basically a huge heated platform with a thin mattress on top.

Dinner wasn't anything to write home about (ironic that I still mention it), but at the place where we were eating (it would be misleading to call it a restaurant), we met a group of Chinese people who were eating behind us. To cut a long story short, they invited us to come and drink beer with them, and the rest, as they say, is history! We were given about 4 hours of free Mandarin practice, and we were also taught a great deal about Chinese drinking etiquette - if the host invites you to "empty your bowl [of beer!]", it is seen as very poor manners not to do so! Some thirty odd bottles later, we crashed out in our Kang-bed.

The next morning, we awoke to a breakfast of yellow porridge, cold boiled eggs, and some rather suspect looking black things, which we soon found out were insects. I lost my appetite instantly, and those who hadn't felt slightly nautious before were definitely feeling pretty ill now.

We soon embarked on our main task of the day - climbing the mountain. The weather was fantastic - about 25/26 degrees, but in our hungover state, we made the oversight of forgetting to buy bottles of water before climbing the mountain! We made hard work of climbing, but the effort was worth it, as we were greeted by amazing views of the village and the surrounding mountains.

Overall, the break was a welcome one, and the mountain village made a pleasant change from the noise and pollution of Beijing's city centre.

I'll blog more later - its getting late, I still haven't done my Mandarin homework, and the dad seems to be annoyed, as I've been hogging the computer for the last couple of hours.

Till then,

Zaijian