merry christmas y'all from beijing!

While Nate is staying with our grandparents in Little Rock, Arkansas and celebrating the holidays with all of our family, I'm here alone in Beijing and it doesn't feel much like Christmas at all.

I've been here almost two weeks but everything has been so exciting that my first bout of homesickness didn't hit me until Christmas Eve morning when I talked to my family on the phone and realized that this was my first Christmas away... and that I live on the other side of the world from their voices. Nate emailed me a picture of my dog Nelson taken after he chased ducks in my uncle's pond, butted heads with a goat, and chased a dozen chickens mercilessly. That photo of a wet dog is the only picture anyone in my family sent me of their holiday so yes I'm feeling left out. Christmas Day, my uncle and cousin went hunting before the sun rose and later cooked the ducks they killed for dinner. I know Nate was glad he got to sleep in and just get to help with the cooking and eating.

I don't have to tell you that my Christmas was nuthin' like that here! At work on Christmas Eve, my coworkers noticed I was depressed and knowing that I love spicy food and hot pot, they took me out to a fancy hot pot restaurant. I forget the name of it, but I will be going back. Next time I'll take some pictures.

On Christmas Day, I visited my friend Rae at her apartment across town. She lent me her bike and she tried to stand up on the back of it (her idea!) while I rode through some hutong alleyways! She had to jump off before I could stop the thing and then for some reason I thought I could be the one on the back. This became the scariest thirteen seconds of my life as I stood on the back of the bike clinging to Rae's shoulders while we merged onto a busy main road. I ended up biking alone the 10+ miles home in 16 degree weather with a windchill of 9-- froze my arse off-- loved it-- and saw for the first time just how much the city has changed since I was here last in 2005. The streets here are chaos with traffic lights almost optional yet somehow the roads still feel safer for bikes than in the States.

Rae came over later (by bus) to make me a Christmas dinner. People here
don't really celebrate Christmas. China's huge holiday is Chinese New
Year during February so Rae taught me how to make what her grandmother
makes for her family during Chinese New Year-- a pork soup famous in
her hometown in the south of China.

Rae insists that the soup doesn't have a name, just "pork soup that my grandmother makes" but it's in the Cantonese-style as is a lot of the food from her hometown in Guangxi Province, a beautiful region in the south of China famous for the Guilin mountains. I have always wanted to go and Rae invited me to go back with her for Chinese New Year. Her family's house is next to the Vietnam border and she says we can just walk across! The train ride to get to Guangxi from Beijing is 26-hours so I'll be doing some soul-searching before I decide to go. The last train ride I went on in China was over 35 hours and I was so sick with some kind of virus during the ride that one of the train workers fined me 100 RMB for basically throwing up too much and being unsanitary. What am I saying, I'll go!

Because of my difficulty posting on the blog (this week's entries will be post-dated as what I've already written). That way I can fill you in on my new job, my lack of a place to live, my awesome new friends, and all about how well I've been eating.

Happy Holidays!

-mk