It already feels like a very very long time since Christmas, which I and many others celebrated in a fine hotel, which laid on not just turkey but also lamb chops, prawns, duck, dumplings, tiramisu, salad, cheese, mashed potatoes, roast potatoes and some other food as well. Its taken me the better part of a week to stop feeling overly full, much to the concern of my ayi, who after the Boxing Day became very worried I was not eating properly.

Sadly, though, this is China, and life here barely even paused for Christmas - we were straight back into lectures on the Monday, and although we have a three day holiday for New Year, two of those three days are on the weekend, and then we have exams... Alas. However, the end is in sight, thankfully. Very thankfully - my patience with Chinese, and especially 8am lectures and my ayi spending half an hour attempting to convince me to have children is wearing very thin. She did get quite inventive with her reasons towards the end, but I remain firmly unconvinced. I have however almost finished reading Harry Potter in Chinese, an achievement which I am going to be quite proud of, and a whole new appreciation of Chinese onomatopoeia. My favourite so far is probably still 'pu' for the sound of a puff of smoke, but 'gulougulou' for the sound of a rumbling stomach, and 'kalakala' for things that go rattle or clunk is still pretty good.


Latest Chinese weirdness: the pavement trees. We had trees planted in our pavements, as you do in cities, in neat little holes in the pavement. One day, overnight, they vanished. They were not small trees, so they left behind them quite big craters in the pavements where the roots had been dug out. Nice, big, muddy craters for innocent people to slip into on the ice... Two weeks later, there have been different trees replanted in the holes. They are of the same size and variety as the previous trees, although they have not had the bases of their trunks painted white. In all other respects they seem to be similarly healthy however. As they are big trees planted into new holes, they also each have rudimentary scaffolding round the base to make sure they don't fall over again. If anyone can know any reason why all this might have been done, I would be interested to know. It baffled me somewhat.

Pantomimes and Promotions

In an attempt to foster community spirit, the students of Dalian Ligong Daxue have variously been cajoled, guilt tripped, blackmailed or plain forced into rehearsing and attending an end of term 'performance'. I will be dutifully attending tomorrow and anticipate spending much of Christmas Eve sitting in a chilly auditorium with a faint smell of rotting sunflower seed shells watching Russians mime along to Chinese hits. It'll be surreal, if nothing else. The hall appears not to have been used much in its 50 year history, and features moth eaten red velvet curtains, wooden chairs, an antique lighting rig now only capable of backlighting performers and a stage large enough to fit most of the audience on.

I'll be onstage as well, as the Queen of Hearts in a magnificent many tiered card hat in the Edinburgh students' rendition of Alice in Wonderland, and the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come in my class production of A Christmas Carol. A Christmas Carol is likely to bring new meanings to the word 'wooden', and has been a slightly fraught process. I'm mildly proud of having written the script, and assisted in the translation to Chinese, but co-ordinating a cast all of whom speak intermediate Chinese in a variety of accents has been tricky. I suspect the only piece of convincing acting will be Nigerian Scrooge attempting to actually pull the Korean playing his (ex) girlfriend on stage, and that might not really be acting... Also, in any sensible city of 6 million people it should be possible to find one shop selling facepaint. I fear the ghosts are likely to walk onstage tomorrow clad in sheets, eyeshadow, and potentially watercolour paint. My role as the Queen of Hearts however has been much more satisfactory - I am now very well acquainted with the Chinese for 'Off with their heads!', a phrase I feel sure I will find many uses for.

My host family have watched the preparations for all this with some bemusement - my host mother still tells guests the tale of the time when I painted a friend's face green, and covered myself in fake blood for Halloween. The card hat in particular has been the subject of some speculation. I did try and explain to them the story of Alice in Wonderland, but this just resulted in more confusion.

However, the main news is that my host father has just been promoted. He's delighted, as is my host mother. It appears that to get promoted he had to through some kind of self-assessment exercise which culminated in delivering a speech to the leaders along with the other 19 candidates, in what I imagine must be somewhat similar to a hellish Chinese bureaucratic version of The Apprentice. He was pleased enough that he read me the entire speech he had given to them, and was amazed when I understood any of it. I'm also delighted for him - he'd been so anxious about this promotion, and it's good to see him looking relaxed again.

Merry Christmas!

With love from the PRC...

Ice

It serves me right: I mocked Dalian for its lack of winter, balmy moderate temperatures, and questioned why exactly it had ski resorts just outside the city.

Hence, Sunday evening, it took revenge. Temperatures plummeted, it rained, froze, snowed then froze, and icy Siberian winds claimed the streets for their own. Monday's daily high was -7, and my ayi duly acted as though the apocalypse was nigh and we would all freeze.

More worrying was Dalian's approach to ice management. China not being a believer in grit, the streets around were transformed into an ice rink, made worse by the efforts of the shovel gangs to clear the snow (thereby revealing the ice beneath). Having slipped, stumbled and staggered my way home from school, I enquired why exactly China does not use grit - apparently it damages the roads. This is perhaps true, but the lack of grit on the roads probably damaged the local economy, as no vehicles dared the ice, and definitely damaged me. I have the bruises to prove it.

Thankfully, Dalian appears to be merely flexing its wintry muscles - temperatures are now back above 0, and it is all starting to melt. Now it is not quite so very cold, I am rueing the fact that I missed the opportunity to take pictures of snow covered Mao statues. He would have made such a good Christmas card.

Chinese Military Bases And How I Wish I Could Avoid Them

I've always been led to believe that Chinese military bases are things to be avoided. They tend to lead to getting arrested, deported, flung in jail, or merely vanishing entirely, all of which are not really things on my to do list right now.  My last year in China I survived quite happily without finding a single one (well, I used to laugh at the barracks next to my school who seemed to practise crawling all the time they weren't playing bugles). However, this time, no matter where I go, they seem to appear...

There is a military university which I accidentally climbed into just over from where I live, but it really started with the trip to Daheishan, a stunning mountainous area just outside Dalian proper. Having ascended umpteen perilous steps of doom up into the mist, we found a base just sitting there, complete with basketball courts in the middle of nowhere. Dandong had military bases aplenty - from the guards on the bridge over to North Korea to mysterious green khaki buildings behind a public park to the warning sign on the border next to the Great Wall. More mysteriously, despite the warning sign, there was no base to be seen...

Then again, perhaps a trip to Lushun (formerly Port Arthur) was not the best way to avoid military bases. Until VERY recently, it and apparently even parts of the area where I am currently living were off limits to foreigners, due to the extreme tactical importance of Lushun's harbour. Its history as a principal battleground of almost every war to grace these parts over the past hundred years or so may also have contributed.

Lushun hence turned out to be a bizarre mix of standard Chinese flat blocks and ex-colonial buildings with plaques declaring them 'Mainly Preserve Architecture of Dalian', including a very fine ex-Russian palace, presumably rebuilt by the Japanese, now a (shut) museum. It also featured statues declaring the friendship of the Russian, Japanese and Chinese peoples, whilst simultaneously trumpeting the glorious Chinese victory over the forces of imperialism and elsewhere a snake museum. With seals. And fake dinosaurs. Oh, and a few warships sitting at harbour in the bay, which I carefully did NOT photograph, a military base which we carefully did NOT enter and yet more military stuff over on the other side of the bay.

We did climb a mountain to find a 'Glorious Victory' monument built by the Japanese (according to the captions by the use of Chinese slave labour in order honour war criminals and imperialism - ever with the unbiased signeage, then, China), and facing it what looked supiciously like yet another a military base. On closer inspection though, it turned out to be an old rocket launching base, now with a display of Chinese military equipment from presumably either the Second World War, or the Civil War. I went and stood on a rusty boat platform to survey the terrain until I felt the metal start to give way beneath my feet... As a day out, it was gratifyingly surreal, and I made it home in time for tea and jazz bars later as well.

However, China, I am getting tired of finding military bases. Please hide them better in future.

For anyone in need of amusement:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/09/confucius-prize-china-winner

Dear, dear CCP, I really did think you were just a little smarter than this, but oh, how you make me laugh...

My life has just taken a turn to the strange side: I am now more or less directing a class end of term performance of A Christmas Carol in Chinese, written by myself in English and translated by a teacher who I didn't realise could speak English into Chinese, with a very diverse cast - Russian ghosts, Korean girlfriends and clerks, Thai Tiny Tim and a Nigerian in the lead role. This is going to be interesting.

I am also down to play the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland (organised by the Edinburgh students here), and am contemplating the creation of playing card headdresses.

I always knew Christmas here was going to  be surreal. I think, however, it may yet have the potential to be more surreal than I had thought...

The Mystery of the Disappearing Host Father

I'd been wondering for a little while where exactly it is my host father occasionally vanishes to. There are times when he is clearly not in, and yet I have not heard him leave, and equally mysteriously returns a short while later. I'd previously put this down to my own absentmindedness, but I increasingly became convinced I actually wasn't imagining things, and he really did vanish occasionally...

After much careful investigation* it turns out that what he in fact does is climb out of the window and shuffle along the ledge to visit his neighbour, a fellow cyclist. I feel I can be forgiven for not realising that this was of course what was happening as we are SIX storeys up. And its not a big ledge. I know. I checked.


*Well, sort of. The careful investigation in fact consisted of hearing someone scream outside my ayi's bedroom window, which on investigation turned out to be the neighbour himself, who had shuffled over to visit us and found the window to be locked. Typically, the three of them spent 15 minutes discussing me, knowing I could understand every word they said, until I escaped with my ears burning and a newly enchanced reputation for untidiness to go and play badminton.