A walk in Bailiuzhou Park on New Year's Day

Although we slept late on New Years' morning, I was determined that we not spend the day indoors, where it was colder than outside, actually. So we got dressed in our new finery and ventured out.

The temple next door proved to be the hot spot of the city. The crowds were thick and the incense smoke even thicker, so after a peek around, we decided to head for the big park downtown, where I had seen them setting up some new year displays of some kind.

I snapped this picture of a man carrying his baby bundled up in a basket..looks cozy doesn't it?


Bailiuzhou Park was filled with "sculptures" of nylon and wire, with lights and featuring all kinds of New years' and Chinese themes..kind of like a Chinese "Lights in Delaware Park", for you western New York readers.

Michael especially liked the greetings from a smiling Deng Xiaoping.


Of course there were balloons for the younger members...

And all the features of a carnival, street food, a bounce house, crafts, and games of chance for Thomas and Michael.

We also took our turn ringing the bell -- I think this is some kind of custom because I saw on TV people all over China doing it on New Years' Eve-- making lots of noise like firecrackers, bells, etc. was associated with warding off evil and bad luck in the old days.

The park was a great place for people watching, as lots of families were out strolling with their kids. I wanted to catch this Muslim woman in head scarf...the whole family was gathered around with their jaws dropped to see Sophia and Helen..

I decided that turnabout was fair play, and since everyone was photographing Sophia, I began taking pictures of their cute kids all dressed up...



Here was one display we could not figure out...who is the rabbit? Probably not the Easter Bunny...?!?!?! (Now I know it is Chang e the moon goddess)

After a long walk we headed home to let the kids shop on our street a little with their hong bao money and eat leftovers from our New Years' Eve feast --we even had enough dough to make some more dumplings..

We finished with some giant oranges, which ended up tasting more like grapefruit. Funny to think that our Chinese New Year in China is over...but the festival continues for more days and we may do some visiting with friends, local sightseeing in Xiamen, and Thomas wants to get to the mall...just like Christmas week in the US...

Puzzler Winner

Our brief New Year puzzler contest has a clear winner: Tanya Loughead! Your fortune cookie will be waiting for you in late July in Buffalo, NY. Who knew? Oyster pails!

We had a long discussion about it on New Years and Thomas thinks he could make a fortune importing them to China for the Fold-Pak Corporation. 1.4 billion eaters are waiting for them. Hey, someone in this family has to make some money.

Happy New Year and welcome Spring Festival

Our New Years' Eve....If you remember my quest for dumpling wrappers from the previous day...you will be happy to know that a team of experts..in the form of our tutor's brother and housekeeper, showed up to teach us how to make wrappers. We had invited our friend Roger and his wife and gamely made our own dough and filling based on internet recipes when we got the call that help was on the way. They showed us how to roll the dough and lent us a rolling pin for the occasion. We rolled the dough into a big tube, cut off one inch segments, rolled these into balls and rolled these balls into circles with the rolling pin...then exactly the right amount of filling was put inside with chopsticks, sealed and presto..a dumpling! They stuck around long enough to supervise me cooking them: we put them in boiling water and gently stirred them..once they boiled we added a cup of cold water and waited for it to come bake to a boil, repeated this twice and they were ready to eat-- we ate it over the dough yet to be made into wrappers..Turning the evening into one long food fest.


A 5 jiao coin is hidden in one of the dumplings...whoever finds it is the luckiest member of the family for the year..Helen, through persistent dumpling eating, was the winner.

The kids all wore their Chinese finery, but Sophia was not content --she also donned her "Cinderella dress" . All evening on TV we had on the New Years' Eve spectacular, which all Chinese families watch apparently..kind of like Dick Clark. We had a feast with all the foods I researched and could prepare in my tiny kitchen...after the dumplings, we had fish, fried noodles and 2 vegetable dishes. At the end of the meal we had a plate of mandarin oranges (with the leaves attached makes them a symbol of prosperity and fertility(!) other fruits and different kids of Chinese candy we had picked up in the market...topped off by ice cream Roger and his wife had brought all the way from Walmart on the bus. Shortly after the kids went to bed, there were fireworks at midnight somewhere in town..not sure where..

In the morning, the kids checked their Hong Bao (red envelopes) which actually contained cash this year.

We also left out for them a bunch of tang 糖 -- candy -- the international language of holidays for children..each also got some red underwear as well...which Thomas pronounced as "weird and freaky"..

Happy Year of the Rat to all our friends and family....

Chinese New Year countdown

It's funny, but in the US we are usually invited to 2 or 3 parties for Chinese New Year, with other adoptive families and the Chinese Club of Western New York, where Helen takes Mandarin lessons. But here in China...Chinese New Year is a family affair, the campus has emptied out, and we are left to our own devices this year. With a little research I have set out to recreate a Chinese New year at home.. first we decorated our door with the banners you see above...they translate to wishes for happiness and prosperity for our family. Just about every home will replace last year's banners with new ones, and many will leave them up all year. It is also customary to hang a decoration with the character "Fu" 福 which means "good fortune, blessings". You hang it upside down, because the word in Chinese for "upside down" sounds like the word for "come", so when people tell you "Fu is upside down", it sounds like saying "Fu comes"... did you follow that?
The older kids and I ventured out yesterday afternoon to see the shopping crowds and start loading up on food for our homemade New Year feast. The storefronts are all decorated.


We went to the No. 7 market..the biggest street market in Xiamen, in particular on a quest for Jiaozi pi (dumpling wrappers) which surprisingly enough, proved impossible to find. Instead I was presented with a bag of flour by several vendors. As Thomas said -- "they don't have the pre-made wrappers...they have Chinese grandmothers to make them". I called my tutor from the market and she promised to bring me some with the filling her mother made...but I bought the flour just in case and spent this morning looking up recipes. It is traditional to make the dumplings on New Years Eve together.

The market proved to be interesting, with stalls of all kinds of fish...

Very freshly killed ducks, and some live ones, too....

All kinds of prepared foods for the holiday..we bought some crabmeat dumplings...

And at the sweet counter, glutinous rice cakes stuffed with sweets and a bread dish which the vendor said was "traditional Chinese New Year treat"...kind of a Chinese hot cross bun I guess.

Finally our quest for wrappers took us to Trust Mart, the local Target/Wal-mart ish store...with a big inflatable out front and....

THOUSANDS of shoppers inside..its a good thing they didn't have what I needed, because I did NOT want to stand in that line!

Take-Out Puzzler

Michael's Chinese New-Year Puzzler: please solve the following mystery. The winning submission will receive a free fortune cookie.

So, what are the Chinese most famous for to Americans? Sure, there is the Great Wall, paper, gunpowder, Bruce Lee, Spring Festival, etc. All impressive. However, those of us who are addicted to Chinese take-out food will likely hit upon the fascinating, distinctive, and utterly efficient white take-out container.

Here is an image pulled of the web.

Nothing says "Chinese" as quickly and definitely for Americans as does that little white box with the wire handle. No one looks at it and wonders whether there is Italian food in there. [Although I have often wondered why other restaurants have not adopted it.] Many of us may even surmise that only Chinese people know how to fold it, like a secret passed on from grandmothers in the steamy back rooms of restaurants.

Here's the mystery: I've never seen one in China! I had assumed that I was coming to the homeland of the little white folded box. But apparently not. We even tried to describe it to our Chinese teacher but she had no clue what we were talking about.

So, now you see why I had to pull an image from the web. I cannot find one here.

Below are two very typical take-out containers in China. At least they are typical here in Xiamen.

Needless to say, they "pale" in comparison to the great white folded box. They do not keep the food as hot, nor can they prevent drips as well as our great American take-out container.

So the mystery is: what explains this problem? Did the great white folded container originate in America? Is it an invention of American born Chinese? Did it originate in some remote province of China that we have not ordered take-out from? A further mystery: why haven't they brought it here?

So the winner gets a fortune cookie ... but you'll have to wait until we return to the States. They don't have fortune cookies here either.

Last day in Lijiang and 2 days to get home

First of all -- let's begin at the end...its Sunday afternoon, and although we left Lijiang at 7 am on Saturday, we have just gotten home. Although we thought we planned a trip that would not coincide with the Chinese New Year travel rush...we did catch a bit of it. Our flight from Lijiang was canceled and the next flight did not get us to Kunming in time for our connecting flight. There were no seats from Kunming to Xiamen for 3 DAYS or more, so we booked a flight from Kunming to Chengdu (straight north -- wrong direction entirely), the airline put us up in a crummy hotel, and we caught a morning flight to Xiamen. Which I am happy to say was sunny and green and lovely to greet us when we finally arrived today. So we are all a bit tired, but I wanted to get the "rest of the story" out before I forget anything.
For our last day, we had a big decision to make. We had tentatively planned a trip up close to this mountain ..the Yulong Xueshan, or Jade Dragon Snow Mountain. You can take a bus ride up to a cable car which takes you up to 13,000 feet on this 18,000 ft mountain. The day dawned bright, sunny and a bit cold. While initially we decided to try, it, we got a late start and would have had to wait until almost noon to get a bus up, so we abandoned our plan and decided to go back to the park we went to yesterday and climb Elephant Hill, a modestly strenuous but short hike to the top of the hill where the mountains meet the city of Lijiang. We had passed the path the day before but been too tired to try.

This is Helen's "look Mom it's snowing" picture...the climb was stairs straight up for about an hour and a half..and since we were at 8000 feet to begin with, at that elevation it was slow going for everyone, especially Michael with Sophia having her "last ride" in the backpack.

In a pine forest about two thirds of the way up were a number of graves, including this inviting seat next to the path, and a Tibetan ceremonial display of some kind.


Finally Sophia got out and hiked her little self up the rest of the way. It was quite cold and windy on the hill...

And when we got to the top and saw the snow squalls on the big mountain we were sure glad we hadn't spent all day heading up into a snowstorm on a bus. While the views weren't that clear, they were majestic and mysterious with all that snow blowing around up there.



Here is Lijiang and the park as we headed back down.

When we got back to town, we decided to make one of Sophia's little dreams come true. For her, Lijiang was all about the PONIES. So we all mounted up..after some difficulty as the first horse refused to carry me and started rearing... and took a leisurely ride through the Old Town, with the Tibetan (or Naxi?) horsemen guiding the ponies....

Isn't that a great hat?


The guy in the picture, as it turns out, is the guy who is on the cover of all the books about Lijiang and this part of the Tibetan plateau.

Here is a woman making baba, the flat bread which along with Yak yogurt was the favored snack while we were here.

We caught the end of a troupe of women dancing..their costumes were pretty fancy, so not sure if they are locals are not, but very colorful.


Also we shot this video of traditional Naxi musicians. In the guidebook I had read that some of these musicians had buried their instruments during the Cultural Revolution to keep them from being destroyed and that some of these instruments were rarely heard anymore as a result of so many of them being destroyed.

So our vacation has come to an end and we are back safely in Xiamen for the Chinese New Year holiday...not sure what we will do or see here, as it seems to be primarily a family event, but we will try to find some friends to hook up with. I really enjoyed the diversity of Yunnan, Lijiang's charm, the excellent shopping (!), the new foods and well prepared Western food, our hangout..Lamu's House of Tibet, and the clear pure air at 8000 feet!

While we have been away, I think China has been in the news worldwide for the severe winter weather which has plagued much of the country, stranding travelers and taxing an infrastructure that is pretty tentative to begin with in some remote areas. I have added a link above to Half the Sky..a worthy agency which helps to increase the nurturing programs in Chinese orphanages. They are also launching campaign for assistance to the orphanages to supply them with food and fuel, which is becoming scare in many areas and consequently more expensive. Some of the orphanages run on tight budgets anyway, and the disaster is stretching these to the limit. The orphanages in the Hunan province, Helen's home province, have been hard hit and as they are pretty far south, they are unused to coping with this much snow. If you are interested in helping them out, you can go to the link to find out more.

Discovering Dongba

Yesterday dawned a bit wet and drizzly, so we headed off on foot to Elephant Hill and the Dragon Pool Park, which lies just a bit upstream from the old town in Lijiang. We did get a glimpse of "new" Lijiang, with no desire to go there. The water flowing down from the mountains in small waterfalls and streams makes a small lake at the base of Elephant Hill.


On a clear day you are supposed to be able to see Yulong Xueshan (Jade Dragon Snow Mountain), the big snow capped 18000 ft mountain we saw yesterday, reflected in the water, but not on this day.

One of our destinations was the Dongba Institute. Dongba is the name of the Naxi religion, a system of folk beliefs deriving from Ban, a pre-Buddhist Tibetan religion. It is also the name of the Naxi language, which I mentioned yesterday.

The written Dongba language is a pictographic language, the only one in the world still in use. Thomas has been carrying around his Dongba dictionary and translating signs for us.

To our delight, at the institute was a young man, a student of the Dongba language, who spoke very good English, and who was willing to spend a great deal of time with us explaining everything. He showed us the plant which the Dongba used in ancient times to make exceptionally long lasting paper.

This book is 400 years old. It is used with students who are learning to read. There are other texts much older, still in good condition because the plant used has insecticidal properties. Thomas and I asked a lot of questions and the student really got warmed up and took us for a tour of the school where he and the other students learn Dongba.

This is the teacher's table, with his head dress and chops (seals). The head dress is passed on from one shaman to the next , father to son, along with the language and the secrets of the shamanistic rites. The student offered to get the shaman to write a message out for us in Dongba script.

The message he wrote out for us was a wish for health, happiness and long life for the family. I will get an up close photo for Thomas to translate when he blogs about Dongba. Check out the video if you can. The audio is an English grammar consultation between Michael and the student.

We went for a nice walk along the river. One observation that kept recurring was the clash between the simplicity of the Naxi culture, for whom these waters are sacred and the ornate Han Chinese contributions to the park, like this pavilion.

This was once the personal temple of the ruling Mu family, but it is not used for anything now and was not in very good shape.

I liked this photo because it captured the feeling of the crumbling pavilion with the lush green world waiting right outside the door.

Here are the guys...after our hike they had a chess tournament in our Lijiang headquarters, Lamu's House of Tibet, while the girls and I had rest time. We actually had pizza for dinner, which resembled actual pizza quite closely. We have only one more day here, and are not sure how to spend it -- might try to take a bus to the cable car up the mountain, or maybe ride ponies around the old town...tomorrow's departure is quite early, so if I don't blog until Saturday night you will know why. And by the way...happy Kitchen God Day. If you have had a portrait of the Kitchen God above your stove, today is the day to smear some honey on his lips and burn him in a fire so that he will make a favorable report about you to the Jade Emperor in heaven. Then you can hang a new one for the coming year...he likes to keep track of the family's activities.