Spring Festival

Pictures say a thousand words? Here's my Spring Festival (Chinese New Year) in pictures:

This little boy, a relative of my friend Wu Yu (see below) became my best friend. He let me light firecrackers with him and invited me to spend the night at this house. I named him Charlie.

Burning "paper" in honor of ancestors.

I guess it's a Spring Festival tradition, and it was a nice tradition to experience. This is the grave of my waipo's husband. My host family asked me to throw some paper on the fire because waigong (grandpa) was a very open person.

A little girl lighting firecrackers on top of a Meishan roof. This was easily the best part of my Spring Festival experience. I can't quite desribe what it's like to have a 6 hour, non stop, 360 degree fireworks show. The only way I can describe it is a pyrotechnic symphony.

Host sister, host mom, and me eating the midnight Spring Festival meal--complete with the obligatory dumplings. Yum.

Wu Yu and her husband Tony. After lunch with the family, we went bowling.

More of Wu Yu's family. For two days these people welcomed me to spend time with them as if I was one of their family. The first day, nai nai (the woman to my right) hosted a majiang and tea day/retreat. The second day, ye ye (the man to my left) took us all out for lunch.

Stay tuned for pictures from my Yunnan trip.

In Between the New Years

If you can ignore the constant noise from fire crackers the children continuously set off and will continue to set off until the Chinese New Year (around Feb. 18th), it’s been generally quiet since school ended a week and a half ago. But when you’re living on a college campus, this also means that everything shuts down until the students return in March. This means not eating my favorite shao kao or the 1 kuai jidan bing (an egg fried into a flatbread). But don’t worry. I’m not starving. There are plenty of noodles to eat and dishes to try. And then there’s always cooking, but…

The New Year started in grand fashion. After attending the best New Year’s Eve Party I’ve ever been to (thanks, Kari), at 4:00 a.m. New Year’s morning I made a trip to the hospital with Devon, one of the Lanzhou PCVs, who had been suffering from an intense pain in her stomach. So after waking up the PC doctor, Simon, Danielle, and I carted Devon to the hospital in the wee hours of the morning. And after a day of watching our friend in agonizing pain, she went in for surgery to remove her appendix. I think by the end of the day I had been awake for a consecutive 38 hours. The rest of the week I was basically all but living in the hospital, since I live close and am one of the few PCVs who possesses a cell phone, making communication between Devon and the PC medical staff in Chengdu much easier.

The rest of the month didn’t have anything nearly as exciting as an unplanned hospital visit. I slept too much, hung out with PCVs and Chinese people, fooled around with my guitar a bit, watched Desperate Housewives (seasons 1 and 2), watched a few movies, studied Chinese characters, and bowled way too much, I’m ashamed to admit. By the end of January, I was ready to be out of Lanzhou for a while, so our winter training came just at the right time.