North China Trip Part I — Taiyuan

Here in China, it's a nonstop party because of the Chinese Lunar New Year. It's also Winter Break/Spring Break for PKU, so our professors went home to spend time with their families. As a result, we really couldn't have class. Instead, we went on a trip to the ancient walled city of Pingyao, which claims to have a 3,000-year history.

One of several entertaining signs. My other favorites were "Watch Out for Black Spot" — referring to black ice, I guess — and "Our Company's Fruit is the Van of Success", which I think was supposed to say "The Fruits of Our Labor Are the Vehicle of Success"

My attempt at taking an interesting photo of the inside of the bus.

We saw two giant nuclear power plants, which sheep grazing around the smokestacks and pagodas overlooking them from hilltops. Everywhere in China there are smokestacks belching steam and soot.

On the way, we stopped in the city of Taiyuan for a traditional New Year's feast with a host family. We broke up into groups of two or three. I went with KP and Deborah.

This is where our host family lives.

For Spring Festival dinner, we made jiaozi (boiled dumplings). First you have to take a hunk of dough and turn it into a thin cylinder. Then you break it into small chunks. These you roll into balls. Then you squash the balls with a roller. After that you put meat and vegetables inside with Chopsticks, and wrap the circle of dough around the filling. The standard way is to fold it like a taco and press the edges together, but we found that you could be quite creative, and no two of mine were alike, once I got the hang of it.

Deborah, Me, KP, Ren Meng (aka Mary), and Cao Xinyu (aka Molly)

The girls show off the finished jiaozi.

A closer view of our handiwork.

Some of my creative dumplings.

More of my weird dumplings, my favorite being the flower/star shape.

After dinner, we decided to go set off fireworks, because in China, fireworks are everybody's favorite New Year's pastime. In fact, people have been setting off fireworks nonstop since we arrived in Beijing. The first night, we heard two enormous explosions, and we wondered whether or not we were being bombed. Gradually, the explosions became more numerous, and New Year's eve was the height of the crescendo. People set off explosions constantly and continuously for 48 hours straight. It was ridiculous.

In fact, as I'm writing this, on February 2nd, four days later, there are still tons of explosions going on outside my window. Looking out I see two separate sets of fireworks, and SHEESH, somebody just set off a huge string of fireworks right outside my window!

We did our part:

After that we walked back to our hotel. The street was all lit up, and people were setting off fireworks all around us. The fireworks got really intense around 9 o'clock, and they escalated continuously until midnight, after which they continued unabated until 3 AM, and then escalated again at 6 AM. You have never seen anything like it, and you will never see anything like it in America. Even the fireworks show at the Sydney Olympics was outdone in terms of sheer ferocity. Maybe China should try this anarchical method for Beijing 2008.

The street in front of our hotel (red columns).

Fireworks lit up the street behind our hotel (taken from the roof).

Taiyuan's skyline as seen from our hotel room, about 10 PM

That's not fog, folks...that's smoke from the fireworks.

OK, that's all for this post. You may have noticed some changes. I redid my site so that it renders properly in Internet Explorer (I hope) because IE can't resize images on the fly, and it can't handle PNG images. I made the page wider so that 500 px pictures from Flickr don't have to be resized. And I replaced my sliding doors CSS setup with plain JPEGs, so hopefully IE users can see my top banner, which I have changed to a picture from Pingyao.

I'll cover Pingyao and the rest of the trip in an upcoming post. Till then, zaijien!