Beijing Life Part 1

Celebrating and watching New Year Festivals

The Chinese New Year has only just ended. After two solid weeks of festivities we can relax and finally sleep. As exciting as the New Year is, and boy do the Chinese know how to celebrate, it can be quite overwhelming niegh frustrating for the foreigner who enjoys their precious hours of sleep.  For two weeks any thought of a full night sleep is mercilessly destroyed by the constant thundering booms and bangs of some of the most jaw dropping fireworks. But after two weeks, hay, we couldn't fight it, so like zombies we clambered outside and played!

This just alludes 'Love'

The New Year festival ends with the Lantern festival which also coincides with Valentines day. Although traditionally the Lantern festival was quite a big deal, with the commercialisation of Valentines the New Year festival now ends with red roses and Chinese tongyuan or yuan xiao. The tongyuan and yuan xiao (very similar but called a different name depending on where you live) is a small white rice flour ball filled with a delicious sugary inside often made from sesame seeds. It can be eaten fried, steamed or in a sweet sugar soup. We joined the masses and bought a range of flavours at the supermarket and boiled them... some were delicious! 

Cooking our own Yuan Xiao dumplings! 

Yuan Xiao at the market 

Kara fortunately had the opportunity to recently go snowboarding on a work trip. Little did she know that not long after would it snow everywhere! (At the Beijing ski fields a large majority of snow is made artificially)! So last week it snowed! And it snowed hard!! It snowed for hours and hours and kept snowing some more.

Although in total it only snowed for a day the snow was amazing and our first 'snowing' experience. Yes we made snow angels! Yes we threw snow balls! Yes we put some in the freezer for later! Yes we jumped in the deep stuf!

Drinking hot tea in the snow!

Strangely however, the snow still hasn't melted, we imagined that it would be gone the next morning but with the well below freezing temperatures we have had lately it creates these rather dangerous ice puddles. A lot of the main roads were quickly salted to reduce accidents and the street cleaners made lots of excellent jumping into piles!

YAY!! SNOWING!!

During the last week, we also visited the Tiananmen  Square. Tiananmen Square is China's largest square and symbols the centre of Beijing. The square is a very important part of Chinese history and many significant and historic events that have shaped Chinese history have occurred there. On our day of visit, hundreds of other Chinese and foreign tourists were wandering about, it was a bit cold for us (you can see below there is still snow on the ground!) so we popped into China's National Museum.

The museum is an amazing building and it was quite educational experience. Probably a little overwhelming as the Chinese ha a very long, long history, but we can say with almost 100% confidence that we absorbed a good 0.8% of the Chinese history! Oh dear!


For now we are off to enjoy some noodles and beef at our local....

Tot siens,
John and Kara