Tag Christmas

Dear Friends, Family, Fellow Travelers, and Random Readers,

Merry Christmas from Beijing, China!

We’re thrilled to be celebrating Christmas from the Middle Kingdom this year. Its a different experience than Christmas back home. For starters, Santa is only featured in a few select Western shopping centers, and his presence isn’t really felt in Beijing. There are no lights on the houses, or little Christmas trees or candles in our neighbor’s windows. Christmas carols are not heard in shops or homes. There are no sales on egg nog. There is no egg nog.

Despite all this, Beijing is in a festive mood. The weather has changed and its suddenly freezing (literally). Hou Hai Lake already has its first firm layer of ice, and people will be skating on it soon. The wildlife (what little there was in the city) has receded into nooks and crannies, and people walk around with scarves pulled up to their eyes and hats pulled down to their noses. I imagine they are all smiling under their winter wear and wishing me Merry Christmas with their desperate, freezing eyes.

There are some holiday events going on in Beijing this year, but mostly they are centered around food and wine, and have little to do with the actual holiday. Luckily for us, family will be visiting our little hutong home and bringing the holiday spirit with them. We have a mini Christmas tree that we’ll be stringing up popcorn on, and we’ve purchased a copy of It’s a Wonderful Life. We’re making our own Christmas fun this year!

The Chinese don’t celebrate the New Year on the 1st. Chinese New Year is coming up (Feb 3rd) and everything will be festive and lively then. It is the single most exciting and celebrated holiday in Asia (and thus, on the planet probably). Fireworks explode from everywhere for several days on end. Two years ago in Shanghai, there were so many fireworks people were throwing them out high-rise windows and one bounced off our taxi, skidding to a stop outside the window and exploded with a shower over the entire car. Its something you can only understand by experiencing, and we’re looking forward to it with fire extinguishers at the ready.

For now, we’re signing off for the remainder of 2010 and wishing you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! We’ll resume updating Abandon the Cube with the dawn of the new year. All our best wishes to you and yours and a happy start to 2011!

Sincerely,

Abandon the Cube

ICHC cat relaxing

As the holidays winded to a close I was reminded of how un-zen-like we can become when we are tossed into a medley of the most stressful and emotional scenarios known on the planet- aka the family reunion. While family time is great, and I’d adore more of it without hesitation, the contrast of traveling and being on your own and then being thrown into the same situations as you were in middle school is, to say the least, disheveling. I found myself banging on the bathroom door with the same whiney voice as a decade ago, “hurry up!!!!!” Sharing a bed with a sibling after a decade of not doing so can be the perfect recipe for no sleep as you stay up giggling and sharing stories, which is fun but leaves you red-eyed and useless the following morning. Not to mention the literally cornucopia of food around the holidays means that I’m always feeling like my jeans are shrinking and yet…another cookie couldn’t hurt! With all of this piled on top of last minute shopping, cleaning for visiting relatives and learning to fit back into the old pecking order, one is left in a very un-relaxed, but gleeful, state.

Here is how to get your zen back, or at least this is how I got my chi back aligned with the stars. First, I got some of those super colorful and probably useless face masks that makes you feel like you are doing something useful for your skin while really all it does is dry it out and make it itchy. Nevertheless, they make you feel like you are pampering yourself, which is sort of the opposite of Buddhism when you think about it. Secondly, I applied said mask while taking a bubble bath, which is something I enjoy when the tub is in America, and not in China where I would never immerse my body in the water. Then I read a book but really my mind wanders while I continue to turn pages and then I realize I haven’t even been reading so I flip back and spend the entire time in the tub trying to find where I left off in the book.

Aside from face masks and bubble baths, I also tried to relax by doing an old past time of mine- yoga. But, since my waist as gained a bit of a cushion around the equator, touching my toes only served to make me feel like vomiting. Unless you are bulimic, then vomiting probably isn’t relaxing to you. I scratched yoga off my list and decided to go jogging. Then I scratched jogging off my list because with all the company visiting the house my running shoes were nowhere to be found. Sigh of relief. Exercise is off the list entirely without shoes, you’ll understand.

The only thing left was manual labor, which many of you probably think is the opposite of relaxing. However, doing something with your hands to create something tangible and good turns out to be a very zen activity. I helped my father and uncle build an awesome deck on the back of the house and didn’t lose a single appendage in the process. We spent half the time hanging a tarp to build under (this is Washington state—meaning it literally never stops raining) but we completed the project and I must say that I now appreciate deck builders more than I appreciate anyone working in an office. Guess I should have paid attention in math class after all. It turns out it is all relevant!

So, in the end I found my relaxation in carpentry, I’m perfectly fine suggesting you try this at home, but if you lose any metatarsals, don’t complain to me! I’m just your post-holiday zen master.

Oura Wan beach

The first evening my brother and I walked around the beach well into the evening talking and taking pictures. We watched the sunset, then sat under the stars. He humored my amusement with the clean air (something we have very little of in China) and the cleanliness of the streets and beaches. We talked long into the night and finally crashed. The next day we were set to pick up our parents and sister from the airport on the southern tip of the island.

The next morning I awoke to bad news- my parents had missed their flight, but my sister had made hers and would be arriving a few hours later than planned. My brother and I prepped for the change in plans by canceling the rental car and the other cabin rental and then searching the web for Okinawan transportation systems. We found them lacking, cabs were the primary mode of transportation without owning a car (and neither of us had an international license). Meanwhile, cab rides were on par with cab fares in the USA– and on our salaries they were hardly an option. We grabbed a government bus as far south as possible then hopped a cab to pick up the sister. Her flight was delayed, so we stopped at a small restaurant where I had my first taste of local cuisine. A very fishy and rubbery noodle soup that tasted, to my uncultured palate, like a balloon soaked in fish guts. Very healthy.

After waiting until the balloon digested, we set off again to search for the missing sister. Finally we found her- pushing three giant suitcases and bundled in several layers of clothing (presumably what would not fit in the massive cases). After hugs and high fives we began the journey back to the cabins- a full two hours by bus with multiple transfers, and then a twenty minute walk uphill to the cabins– with enough luggage to warrant a minivan. When we finally arrived back at the cabin we collapsed on the couches and did not move for some time.

Because our parents could not make it, they had hastily repacked our sister’s suitcase with gifts, and these we poured around a small Christmas tree I had brought from China. We opened a few gifts that evening– my other sister had sent us UNO, the card game, so we drank Cpt Morgan and Coke and played UNO well into the night.

-Posted by Lauren.