Adventures in China: Back in the PRC

Happy Chinese New Year!

I got back to Beijing just in time to help welcome in the Year of the Rabbit. I was home for four weeks and had a great time seeing friends and family. One particularly exciting thing happened while I was there: Laura and I got engaged! We had gone into DC for the afternoon so that I could show Laura around a little bit since the only times she'd been in DC in the nearly two years we'd been together was on race courses. After walking around the Mall for a bit, we made our way down to the Tidal Basin by the FDR Memorial. Despite wearing this ancient and ridiculous old fur hat of mine, Laura was still freezing. She said, "This is really pretty, but I can't feel my toes. Can we please go back to the car?" I too had been warmer, but I had a plan, so I convinced her to walk just a bit further to a bench sitting in the sun. I directed Laura's attention across the Tidal Basin towards the Jefferson Memorial; meanwhile, I [not so stealthily] removed a small ringbox from inside my coat. I told her, "So...I have a question for ya," and Laura, smirking at this point, replied "Yeah?" (It's worth mentioning that at this point that I wasn't the coolest of cucumbers, so it was rather obvious that something was up.) I turned her around and, getting down on a knee, asked "Will you marry me?" Laura nonchalantly replied "Yeah, I could do that". It wasn't until several minutes later that she stopped and asked if she had, in fact, said "yes". When I told her what the actual reply had been, she thought I was kidding. My grandparents had gotten into town that evening and Michael had a long weekend leave, so the whole gang was together for the first time since June.

After a couple more weeks of drinking the tap water, soaking in blue skies, and visiting potential wedding venues, I flew back to Beijing. The haze was there to greet me when we landed. As I took the subway from the airport back to Wudaokou, I noticed that the subway was mercifully empty...especially for a weekend. I then remembered that the first day of Chinese New Year had been three days earlier, so a many Beijingers had participated in the massive, country-wide exodus and gone home to their families to celebrate. But in a city of 22 million, even if a large chunk of the populous leaves, there are still several million people still sticking around.

In the week since my return, the city has been filled with the near-constant cacophony of fireworks and firecrackers. During the day, the rat-a-tat of firecrackers echoes off of the tall concrete apartment buildings like machine gunfire; at night the skies are illuminated by multi-colored explosions and the apartment complexes again lend their acoustics to the ka-booms of fireworks that would ordinarily appear to be professionally prepared. But that's the thing--it can all be bought on the street by the everyman. It just depends on how much money you want to spend.

We aslo got a couple inches of snow...something that Beijing and its citizens seem poorly equipped to handle. The white blanket provided a pretty change of pace from the ubiquitous grey cement, though the snow on the streets and sidewalks was almost immediately blackened by exhausted and pollution. Between the bitter cold and the icy sidewalks, I'm still holding out for warmer weather, but the snow was at least a change of pace.

Unfortunately, the friend with whom I was meant to travel out to the northwest with managed to contract dengue fever from a mosquito in Thailand, so that adventure was put on hold. Classes resume on the 28th, so until then I'm just studying, trying to explore the city some more, and already missing foods like guacamole, cheese, and good beers.

More soon.