Happy 牛 Year!

The title, for those who can't see Chinese characters (and those who can't read them even if they can see them) says "Happy Niu Year" where "niu" means "cow" (we're entering the year of the cow) and it's vaguely pronounced like "New" (in reality like KNEE-OWE done as a single syllable).

As I start typing this it's 9PM on the eve of Spring Festival (a.k.a. Chinese New Year). As is traditional, the family has had a delicious lunch (stuffed lotus root, lotus root and spare rib soup, Wuxi-style spare ribs, a local green with no English name, cold sliced beef with green chilis and a meatball/mushroom dish) followed later on by a delicious dinner of the traditional dumplings (consider them to be Chinese pierogies and you're about right) that you're supposed to eat for the holiday. And, of course, I'm reporting to you live from ... well, Baghdad is quieter now, so let's say I'm reporting to you live from the Gaza Strip. Firecrackers are going off all around me (it's traditional to set off a string of them before eating) and in preparation for the actual new year people are already letting off fireworks.

This is going to get louder, much louder, in three hours when midnight hits. It's an experience that can't be described to anybody who hasn't been through it (or through something similar like a really vicious firefight). The individual pops and explosions of fireworks will not be distinguishable when the real show starts. It will instead be an insanely loud roar that even closing all the windows and doors will do little to alleviate.

It's glorious!

This will be Lucas' second Spring Festival, but this time he might actually be awake to watch the fireworks in the sky. (Last year he was far too young to see anything, really.) I'm looking forward to his reaction to the fires in the sky.

I'll say something tomorrow about all this assuming: a) I survive the experience again, and b) I remember.

The sign says all you can eat...

...not all you'd care to eat. This line comes from a Far Side comic from many years ago. I was reminded of it yesterday for some reason.

Robert, a colleague from my previous school (some of you may remember him from the wedding) finally joined the 21st century and bought a computer. He consulted with me to select the computer and then Joan acted to bargain for him. This gave him a pretty decent laptop for a good price.

To reward us for our efforts, Robert, together with his girlfriend Xin Xia, took Joan and I out for dinner at "Kaiwei Beer House" -- a sort of upscale hotpot/buffet restaurant of the all-you-can-eat variety. There everybody pigged out (even Joan: she's entering her "permanently hungry" phase of pregnancy it seems) and we sat for close to two and a half hours talking, eating and generally enjoying ourselves. Finally we asked for the bill.

Now there were some food items left on the table. The waitress apologetically told us that if there was food left over we'd have to pay a surcharge. This led to some initial consternation, but this was rapidly followed with shrugged shoulders and us chowing down further. Then Joan decided she wanted more of this item. Xin Xia wanted more of this other item. Then the desserts were spotted and grabbed. Then salads were proposed and consumed. (Yes. In that order. Don't ask me to explain. My brain hurts.) A half-hour later we finally finished. Again. This time with an empty table, so no surcharge.

So let me get this straight: if we leave some food behind (and it wasn't a lot!) we have to pay extra but if we eat that food, plus a whole lot more, and we occupy a table for an extra half-hour, the price isn't raised?

I love this place!

Happy Birthday To Me

So, today is my birthday. I've already talked about the present I got (and the amusing way in which it was bought) in yesterday's blog entry. Today I'll talk about the birthday itself. I'll be updating this entry as the day progresses so stay tuned.

My day opens up with the best present possible: waking up next to the beautiful girl who was somehow sufficiently brain-damaged to become my wife. After that a printer is next to nothing.

I woke up long before Joan did, so I spent much of the morning watching her and listening to her snore lightly. I also experimented with moving around and watching her move after me (although this had the side effect of continually shrinking the space available to me on the bed). Finally she woke up and wished me a happy birthday. We then got up.

Joan's mother had been busy. When we got up, we were faced with the traditional birthday...

...noodles. Yes. You read that right. Birthday noodles. You were expecting cake?! Which country do you think I live in again?

In China the birthday tradition is to make a bowl of "long life noodles" -- basically a spicy noodle soup with slices of beef, vegetables, mushrooms and other things (this one had spicy sticky rice dumplings, for example)
-- and, to be strictly traditional, share it with family and neighbours. (We decided to keep it in the family, however. We're not that traditional. Our neighbours aren't Chinese and wouldn't understand the meaning of it anyway.)

That's it for the morning report. Stay tuned as I update my birthday report over the day.

Afternoon update:
Joan had to go to the dentist today to get her braces adjusted, so I was left pretty much alone all afternoon. I tinkered with my printer, mostly, figuring out how to make it do its tricks and such. I also, as an acid test, printed off an e-book I'd been wanting to get run off at a print shop for a while. The new printer is sweet: fast and yet with good quality output. This even though the Linux drivers don't support it fully.

Evening update:
My birthday dinner was delicious. Joan's mother bought some 夫妻肺片 (Lit. "Married Couple Lung Pieces" -- mysteriously named because as far as I know there's no lung pieces in it, nor any married couples), a dish consisting of sliced beef, sliced beef tripe, sliced beef blood vessels, peanuts -- all in a peppery, garlic oil sauce. Other dishes included 腐乳 (fermented "cream tofu"), a marinated tofu and pepper dish, some Chinese cabbage hearts, and fried, spicy fish.

After dinner my friend from SCUM dropped by with his girlfriend. Oh, and a new coffee maker as my birthday present, so now its time to find some decent coffee.

Night-time update:
So, I headed out for my night-time walk and fell into a mud puddle, coming home dripping wet. Fun, fun, fun. Still a decent birthday overall.

Playing With Words

I like words. I like words in particular that don't exist. One of my favourite episodes of Duckman, for example, involved a running gag surrounding the fictitious word "proxyglossoriasis" (spelling approximated) which is supposedly a disorder in which one replaces the word one intends to use with the next word in the dictionary. The effect is hysterectomy.

I also like using the word "spectabulous" -- coined by Greg Porter of BTRC, if memory serves -- which is defined as "being so good that you have to invent a new word to describe it". (It's a portmanteau of "spectacular" and "fabulous" you see.

In that vein, there is a word I use which I also coined. It is a portmanteau of "China" and "anaphylaxis": chinanaphylaxis. It means "having a psychological allergic reaction to living in China".

Today was a big chinanaphylaxis day.

I knew it was coming. It's Spring Festival time and this is when the Chinese are at their most Chinese. Today, in particular, was visiting the relatives who visited us yesterday (as previously blogged). The day was a disaster from the beginning onward. I'll gloss over the gory details of getting there and just let you imagine an unhappy rant about people who can't seem to communicate what they've got planned for you, where it will be, when it will be and how many places you're going to stop off at in between for indeterminate lengths of time. Because, apparently, actually telling people what is planned for a day is a State Secret whose revelation in advance is punishable by death. Or something.

Anyway, that set the tone for the rest of the evening. Which consisted, basically, of me sitting in the corner of an apartment and playing my Nintendo DS. (Thank GOD -- or at least Misha -- for that thing!) I would get called up to eat or to play the trained monkey for a while every so often, but mostly people around me were having a great time socialising, talking, reading, watching TV, etc. while I was bored out of my skull.

Insert here a long, unhappy rant about a culture for whom the word "no" means "he's just being polite, so let's force him".

And the worst thing about it all? Nobody was doing this to hurt me. Nobody at all was saying "what can I do today to piss Michael off the most". They were just doing what good Chinese hosts and families do. It just unfortunately was badly timed (c.f. above re: the horrific trip there) and badly executed ("culture clash" is the term bandied about most often). So not only was I aggravated most of the day, I had nobody to actually point fingers at as the malevolent source of the aggravation. This actually makes things worse.

The day wasn't a complete write-off. The food was good (although not as good as the food cooked by my mother-in-law). I lost track of all the dishes, but the best one was the tripe with mixed pepper. The stir-fried squid with mixed pepper was a damned close second. And my darling wife accidentally referred to "Andy" as "Candy" and then looked charmingly perplexed when I mentioned that I doubted Andy went to Mexico for that kind of operation....

Spring Festival

So today is the second day of the New Year (Chinese reckoning) and I've had my wife's aunts, uncles and cousins over for dinner. My mother-in-law did her usual excessive cooking routine and made assorted delicacies and specialities. If memory serves there were (in many cases the names are made-up to describe, not translated):

• homemade meatballs and fish balls with wood ears and some kind of mushroom;
• fried chicken drumsticks;
• lotus root and spare rib soup;
• stir-fried green beans with some kind of leafy vegetable I couldn't identify;
• battered lotus root with pork;
  
• some kind of vegetable that has no English name (菜苔 in Chinese, although I may have the characters wrong);
• pork and taro root cracked rice casserole;
• mutton and carrot hot pot;
• wormwood salad;
• stir-fried beef tripe and pepper;
• a mixed cold dish containing marinated beef, beef blood vessels, tripe, coriander and peanuts.

All of this was after the huge breakfast of homemade dumplings (Chinese dumplings are like Polish perogies) and the day full of snacks of various sorts.

And, yet, somehow I'm still losing weight over the holidays.