Happy New Year! 新年快乐！

the CCTV building in steel and glass. yum, pollution at its finest.

the inside of the famous national theatre

water cube, in the flesh.

birds nest.

top of the white pogada temple, the most interesting part of the whole place.

from right to left, me, my sister, my cousin

me and my sister

fireworks!

Happy New Year! for those of you who are confused, the Chinese New Year was earlier this week. It is now the year of the cow. So far, the Chinese New Year, or Spring Festival, has turned out to be a mix of new years, Thanksgiving, and 4th of July. Family, food, fireworks, and a new year, all in one big holiday! The fun (and eating) started on Sunday, New Years Eve. We went to a relative's house in the afternoon. My sister, cousin, and I went to a Temple Fair, basically a carnival on temple grounds. We had a good time wandering around watching everything and buying crazy hats, in the pictures above. I figured, hey, people stare at me anyway, might as well give them a good reason! After a absolutely massive dinner, it was time for fireworks. I stepped outside and immediately thought I was in a war zone. Huge blasts were coming from every direction and huge light bursts lighting up the sky. I stuck close to my family and was a little jumpy. They offered to let me light a few fireworks, but I refused. Didn't seem like a good idea at the time, or now for that matter. after 10 minutes of firework after firework, some of them even ours, we went back inside and we headed home. When we got home I found, to my dismay, that more food was in the making. We made Chinese dumplings to be consumed at midnight. Consigned to my fate, I ate more. I finally collapsed into bed at 1 in the morning, serenaded to sleep by the sounds of fireworks and car alarms.

The next day, we went to lunch with more family. After consuming more food than I would have liked, we headed back to their apartment, where my sister, cousin, and I collapsed on the couch in mid-conversation and fell asleep. We were awoken a few short minutes later to go to another relative's house for dinner. Great, more food. By the time I went home that night, I felt like a round ball. I rolled in to bed, again falling asleep to more fireworks and car alarms.

The next day went in pretty much the same order. Over all, i was pretty surprised by the amount of fireworks that went off this week. Even now, 4 days after new years, there are still fireworks, and it is daytime! I thought that after the first night, there couldn't possibly be any more fireworks left in the whole city, but I was wrong. The amount of food was also utterly ridiculous. I learned to eat really slowly. If i didn't eat, random relatives would just put more and more food on my plate. If i still didn't eat, they would assume I just didn't like that particular dish and give me another one. Eating quickly is just a bad idea. But, if I ate slowly, I could appear as though i was consuming more than I actually was, and keep everyone happy.

For the Spring Festival Holiday, school children get 4 weeks off of school, and SYA is no exception. We spent the first week with our families, and next week we are off to Yunnan, a providence in southern China on the border with Vietnam. Yunnan is kind of like the Chinese Florida, most Chinese go there for a warm vacation and it attracts a lot of foreigners. I am super excited to go, and this time we are flying instead of a 50 hour train ride. I can't wait to see the sun again.

sorry about the long silence, but life has been pretty hetic over here. We had 3 weeks of school in between breaks, and our teachers tried to squeeze in as much as possible. I will write again when i get back!

Stephanie

Christmas in China

After much searching, we finally found someone taller than Mark in China.

Yum, scorpion.

Mark liked the scorpion, but wouldn't eat it until I did. But, he liked it in the end. He's still alive, anyway.

We couldn't resist trying the frog. Didn't taste too bad, but then again, it was fried.

Thank you, everyone, for the massive amounts of chocolate I received.

Aunt Mary Ann and I are trying to find my apartment building in a mini Beijing model. A much harder task than you would think. Even the model was huge.

The famous CCTV building in miniature.

MERRY CHRISTMAS!! HAPPY NEW YEAR!!! AND HAPPY HOLIDAYS!!! Christmas was awesome in Beijing. My aunt Mary Ann and brother Mark visited Beijing from Cleveland. They got here last friday in time for the SYA holiday party and left yesterday afternoon. I had an awesome week with them here in Beijing.
Well, i rounded last week off with 5 finals, which went wonderfully as far as i can tell, but i won't really know until i go back, so i will enjoy my happy ignorance until then.
So, on Saturday, we went to the great wall with Julia's family. Turned out to be a little cold, but not too bad until it started to get windy. I really enjoyed getting out of the city for a few hours, no pollution, less people, and a nice relaxing day. In the afternoon, we went to the Ming tombs to soak up some more history. In the evening, we had a wonderful dinner together with my host family.
On sunday, the weather was really really cold and windy, making walking around outside pretty hard, but we did it anyway. We walked around a few parks and unfroze over lunch. In the afternoon, we went to 798, the art district. We saw a couple of really cool little galleries, but the best park was the Dior exhibit. The clothes were interesting enough, but the exhibit was really really weird. Lots of flashing lights and wall to wall mirrors. We left a little disoriented, but it was a pretty cool exhibit nonetheless.
On monday and tuesday, Mary Ann worked, and Mark and I had the city to ourselves. Don't worry, we were good. Despite the draw of bars and tatto parlors, we explored a few temples, including the Lama temple, the Confucius temple, and the Temple of Heaven. Seriously. Anyway, getting around the subway during the day was fun. Unlike my previous experience in cleveland, the subway comes regularly and was not completely empty. We had a good time trying to figure out the most round about and inconvenient way to get anywhere, to amusing results.
for the rest of the week, we did the usual sightseeing in Beijing, the Forbidden City, Summer Palace, and Wanfujing night market. The night market was fun as usual. I got Mark to eat some pretty good stuff, although he still complains to this day about the stinky tofu i made him eat. sticky tofo is basically tofu fermented underground for awhile then fried up and served, like all good fried things, on a stick. yummy. mark thought so anyway. he ate the scorpion, snake, and shark, but the tofu was the thing that got to him. we also went to a market and bargained for christmas presents. we all had a great time, Mary Ann is an expert bargiainer and mark mad e agood start. all the shopkeepers were pretty surprised that i spoke chinese and gave me a "discount" because of it. huh, right.
on friday, we went to the Urban Planning Expedition. we eventually got there even after my poor map reading skills got us pretty lost. they had a couple pretty coold exhibits, but the best was a mini model of beijing. i spent a lot of time trying to find my apartment. it was pretty cool to see the city laid out in front of me, i got a much better appreciation for how big the city really is because the model was not even the whole city.
i was sad on saturday to see them go back to Cleveland. i still have a whole week of vacation to bum around Beijing by myself.
miss you all,
Stephanie

Ritan Park and Church Hopping

The bubble tea stand to whose bubble tea I have become addicted. The people who work there know me and don't even bother to ask what I want anymore.

Ice skating at Hohai park. I, alas, had no skates, but had fun nonetheless.

A pickup hockey game in progress.

My birthday cake.

My family. From left: me, my sister, my mom, my cousin's girlfriend, my cousin. My dad took the picture.

Ritan park.

View from the middle of Ritan Park.

the classic ping pong tables.

random northface climbing wall in the middle of a park.

bored at a park.

a super cool Xinjiang (Chinese/Musilim ethnic group) style restuarant with banquet style dining.

so, i've been super busy and haven't had a lot of time to write blogs. last week, even though i had tons and tons of free time, i never got around to writing. last week we had speeches, given in chinese, lasting 2 or 3 minutes long. The speeches were awesome because they were during chinese class, so no chinese homework. no chinese homework means that my homework load minus 3 or 4 hours, leaving about 1 hour left, much to my delight.

two weekends ago was a lot of funmy friends and I had a great time at the 'alien market'. i am pretty sure the name is just a really bad translation, but my friends and i came up with our own interpretation. only aliens would tempted to buy most of this stuff. anyway, we left pretty quickly. we wasted some time in a bread store and my friend bought me some cake behind my back for an early birthday. then we went to a park, Ritan Park, and wandered around for a while. in the middle of the park there is a lake, which was frozen over. a couple of intelligent children were trying to break through the ice. not that i ever did that....there was also a random north face climbing wall in the middle of the park for no apparent reason. and to round off the evening, we ate some ethnic chinese/muslim food. yummy.

two friday nights ago, we went to this super cool barbeque restaurant. we got beef tongue and it was very delicious. afterwards, we were still a little hungry so we went to a vegetarian restuarant. half way into our meatless meal, we realized the irony of going from a barbeque to a vegetarian place. it was fun stuff. super cold outside, though. i bought a harry potter scarf, its red and gold and says harry potter on it. and i paid 10 kuai for it. the joys of china...

My birthday in beijing was awesome. The day before, my friends took me out to lunch. The day of, Sophie and I had fun shopping before going home to start our mountain of homework. My family took me out to eat and bought me an awesome cake. Other than that, I just did a lot of homework.

So, last weekend, I spent a lot of time studying for finals, but Julia and I had fun on Sunday morning church hopping. yup, church hopping. we had a list of churches in Beijing and went to a few of them to scope them out. We had a lot of fun looking at the different churches and talking to the people who worked them. All of the masses we found were in Chinese, but thats part of the fun. I think the churches offered masses in other languages, but thats just not as fun. We were very surprised at the number of attendents at the masses who were Chinese, I guess the reason why the mass was in Chinese. One mass we went to only had about 3 or 4 foreigners in attendence, including us, out of about 300 people. Also, there were multiple masses in the day, not to mention many masses during the week.

So, this week is our last week of school before winter break. We have finals today, tomorrow, and friday, and then we are free for 2 weeks. Can't wait.

happy holidays and Merry Christmas to all.
Stephanie