Beijing

Beijing was cold and dry, and just like I remembered it almost 2 years ago.  When I arrived for the first time in Beijing, it was the tail end of the Chinese New Year, and firecrackers were still going off throughout the city like gunfire.  A dark cold night, wide abandoned streets, and constant popping and crackling were my first impressions.  We were hustled to a jiaozi guar, with an unfamiliar deformation of the pronunciation of the mandarin "guan," just like the word fuwuyuar, "server," that the old-hand students shouted at the top of their lungs for someone to take their order.  This was a necessity to get served in the human sea of Beijing.


It's still like that, of course.  The roads are wide and the sidewalks are paved with slate stones.  The whole city gives you the feeling that you are small within something expansive.  Things go on forever: the plain-like land below the city rails, the broad avenues, the airport terminals.  This is China that the Chinese histories celebrate - great forces of people, land and power.  Taiwan is cramped and trapped in comparison.  When the KMT moved the Republic of China to Taiwan in 1949, I think they left China behind.  The sweeping grandeur of Chinese history can only be played out on the mainland's landscapes, with its plains, mountains and deserts; not the claustrophobic jungles and precipitous mountains of Taiwan.


What am I saying?  I'm just saying mainland China's big, that's all.  And Taiwan's a funny place to call China.  Please don't take this politically, dear reader.

Happy Chinese New Year!

Alright, that was maybe four days ago.  That's alright.  Chinese New Year has been for me, basically, staying at home while it rains outside.  People set off fireworks for a while, but that's stopped, maybe because of the rain.  I remember when I arrived in Beijing at the end of the Chinese New Year, people set them off nearly nonstop to the very last day.  Maybe it's the rain here.

Chinese New Year's is a time for snacks.  This is because you have to go to your relatives' houses and sit around a lot, and then you eat snacks.

I had wanted to go biking and all kinds of stuff outdoors, but this rain, which has lasted about five days (about since New Year's began) has not abated.  I went to my cousins' house yesterday and tried to play computer games, but that mostly did not work, because computers never work in LANs, not any that I've met.  I have mixed feelings about going to my cousins' house.  Almost the whole family has some weird issues with control.  Especially with food.  My oldest cousin also worries constantly about traffic jams and rain.  It's all mostly benign, and done out of benevolence.  But it gets on the nerves, that's all.

That's all that's happening now.  I went to Beijing two weeks ago.  That was nice.  I wasn't there long enough though.  All I can say is that it was really great seeing people I know there, and that it was kind of cold.  A dry cold.  I feel colder in Taiwan though.  It's wet and cold, and there's no heating.  It averages out to be colder here to me.