Christmas Surprise

Since Muir is in India this week, I thought it would be a happy idea if I suprised him by decorating the apartment for Christmas.  So this little elf got to work and made her very own Christmas tree!  

This is one of my favorite craft projects.  All you need is masking tape, six wire coat hangers, garland, and a string of lights.  At Lotus, these supplies cost about $30 USD.

1.  Arrange two coat hangers into a chevron and secure with tape.  Repeat with the remaining four coat hangers so that you have three chevrons altogether.

2.  Slide one pair of hangers through the center of another pair to make an "X."  Add the third pair along the radial axis and secure with tape.  You could only use two pairs of coat hangers for an "X" frame, but the tree will end up looking a little square-ish.

3.  Starting at the top, secure one end of a garland strand with tape and wrap/weave the garland around the frame in a downward spiral.  Secure the ends to the frame as well.

4.  Repeat with the lights.

5.  Plug in the lights, and voila--instant Christmas!

Our Christmas corner.  Not exactly a fireplace, but it does heat the apartment!

I cheated and bought the stockings.  (I left my glue gun at home!)

It's beginning to look a lot like...Christmas?

It seems that no matter how far one travels, you cannot escape the over-commercialization of Christmas.  I went to the grocery store on Saturday (November 26th, two days after Thanksgiving) for my weekly comestibles, and this is what greeted me inside:

But where's the Menorah?

The Christmas display was especially surprising because China is primarily atheist, but locals I've talked to have said that more and more young people are starting to give gifts to each other to celebrate Christmas, even though they have no idea why the holiday exists.  The gifts that they commonly give are also quite unusual.  Similar to gifts given during the Spring Festival (Chinese New Year), they include things like traditional white alcohol, money (from adults to children) in red envelopes, and meat.  Yes, meat.  I commonly see roast ducks and pieces of dried beef in vacuum sealed bags and packaged in red paper shopping bags ready for gift-giving.  Apparently nothing says "Merry Christmas/Happy New Year" like a bag of jerky.  I think Muir would probaby approve of this tradition.

Speaking of Muir, he is spending the week in India working in the Bangalore office, so this weekend has been especially low-key.

The Thanksgiving Post

You'd think that it would be impossible to get a Thanksgiving dinner with all the trimmings in China, but not so!  Luckily for us, The Bridge Cafe (one of our favorite coffee shops) was hosting a by-reservation-only Thanksgiving dinner for about $30 USD per person.  I don't remember the entire menu, but the meal included roasted turkey, honey-baked ham, scalloped corn, mashed potatoes and turkey gravy, stuffing, chef salad, fruit salad, cranberry sauce, red wine, garlic bread, green beans, candied sweet potatoes, pumpkin pie, apple pie, coffee and tea.  Ok, maybe I do remember the entire menu.  :)  I'm also happy to report that the food was all very tasty.  Here's how Beijing does Thanksgiving:

Red table cloths, just like the ones the Pilgrims had

Table for two

Me and Cyclops

First glass of wine in three months!

Volunteering, Trip to Hou Hai

On Saturday afternoon, I volunteered to conduct informational interviews with prospective Cornell students for the Cornell Alumni Admissions Ambassador Network (CAAAN).  Part of the purpose is to recruit good students and part of it is to report back to the admissions office about how our meetings went.  I spoke with three applicants about what they were interested in studying and answered their questions about Cornell.  All three of them were early decision candidates, but I only felt that one of them should be offered admission.  The official party line regarding the reports is that they do not affect the students' admission offers, but they also say that the reports are extremely "helpful," so I suspect that they actually do count in the admission committee's decision to offer an applicant admission or not.  Regardless, I just didn't tell the students I spoke with that I was even writing a report so that they wouldn't get worked up about it.

Saturday night, we met Muir's friend Hannah (from PiB), Hannah's sister Rachel, and Rachel's boyfriend for pizza in Hou Hai.  Hou Hai is a lake near the center of Beijing surrounded by bars and restaurants nestled in hu tongs.  There are cute bridges crossing the water, lights and paper lanters, alleyways to walk through, music blaring from store fronts, and delicious smells wafting in the air.  It's pretty cute, and theme-parkesque.

Definitely hat and scarf weather

View of Hou Hai

At Hutong Pizza with Jan, Rachel, Muir, and Hannah.
Everyone looks like they've had laser vision correction except for me!

Heat at last!

The central heat turned on sometime last weekend, and since then, the apartment has been nice and warm.  For this, I am very thankful.  We may just survive the winter.

Trip to the Summer Palace

Last weekend, Muir's boss Carl arrived in Beijing for a few days and on Sunday, the three of us ventured out to visit the Summer Palace.  The Summer Palace was the occasional residence of Beijing's emperors and empresses, from well, Wikipedia says 1750, but since different parts were built/incorporated at different times, it's hard for me to say exactly.

Anyway, the site is basically a very large, walled park interspersed with buildings, pavillions, gates, statues, etc.  The main geographic features of the Summer Palace are Kunming Lake and Longevity Hill.  We started at the North Gate of the Summer palace, and walked south to the top of Longevity Hill, and then descended the east side of the hill and continued walking south along Kunming Lake so that we could cross Seventeen-Arch Bridge and visit the South Lake Island.  There were lots of fun things to look at and the foot paths within the Summer Palace were fun to walk through.  It was kind of like trekking through unexplored wilderness, with lots of hills to climb and trees obscuring views of the outside world.  It was easy to imagine being in China a few hundred years ago.  Enough jibber jabber.  Here are the pictures!

Early morning sunlight

On the bridge over Suzhou Street, a cute canal with shops
on either side below the bridge

Striking a post in a round doorway

In front of the Tower of Buddhist Incense
which was recently renovated before the
2008 Olympics in Beijing

Decorative detail of the Tower of Buddhist Incense

View from the top of Longevity Hill looking down on
the most concentrated collection of buildings in the
Summer Palace, Kunming Lake, Seventeen-Arch Bridge, and
South Lake Island in the distance

Man practicing calligraphy using
a bucket of water and a long brush

Man preparing to fly a kite on Seventeen-Arch Bridge;
Tower of Buddhist Incense in the background

Show me the money!

Today was a good day at work.  It was a good day at work because--duh-du-du-dah!--I got paid.

My first paycheck in China.

Muir and I celebrated by going out for the second cheapest dinner we've found so far in Beijing, which was two big bowls of wonton soup in the cafeteria basement of the Hua Lian supermarket.  This past Monday, the boss and I finally signed my contract, so that's why I was especially happy that the company honored their promise to pay me for the past few weeks of work.

On Wednesday I had a substitute Chinese teacher because my usual teacher was sick and had gone to the hospital.  I'm not sure exactly what was wrong, but I'm guessing something to do with his upper respiratory system.  Don't worry, I feel fine.  I was mostly disappointed with the substitute's teaching style and am looking forward to my usual teacher's return.

R2-D2.0

Beijing is infamous for its poor air quality.  And every time after I climb the six flights of stairs to our apartment and feel especially winded, I can't help but feel like my reduced lung capacity is not just a figment of my imagination.  (Those of you who saw the video tour of our apartment also got a nice view of the smog hovering outside our windows.)  In fact, it's probably not just my imagination.

The US Embassy monitors the concentration of particles less than 2.5 micrometers in diameter (PM2.5) and posts their results about once an hour on their live Twitter feed.  The EPA characterizes PM2.5 as "fine particles," and they are the most dangerous since they are so small that they can enter the blood stream through the lungs.  Particles this small come from things like burning diesel fuel and coal.  Gross.  So to help protect our health at least a little bit, this week we ordered an air filter.  Meet R2-D2.0.

Boop boop beep boop!

He filters out particles > 20 nanometers (.02 micrometers), so at least while we're at home, we'll breathe a little easier.