New Years In China

Today was the start of the Chinese new year. That's on a lunar calendar, for anyone who's interested in that sort of thing. Main point of today's post is pretty much a description of how I spent the day, though, which is ending for me as it's starting for you. Time zones are cool like that.

I had a slow morning. I had food in the fridge, which I heated up and ate for breakfast. I hung out in the morning, attempting to get Skype to work so I could get in contact with someone from my home university. They wanted me to do that because the residence director is back in the USA over break and the academic director is in Beijing, so they wanted someone to check in with me. (I totally get that, I had fairly major meltdowns a couple times during the semester where I actually needed help getting food. They don't have enough experience with my particular set of issues to get why I'd be in much better shape over break, and I didn't really expect them to. With the level of understanding they had, I think they expected break to be an utter nightmare, honestly.)

But it was telephone (Skype) tag again today. It's been that for a few days actually. Fail. I go do other stuff, mostly puttering around my room, figuring if she tries to call me I'll hear it. Apparently not, because I had some missed calls on my Skype that I found checking in the evening.

Morning passes, I go out to find lunch. Since it's new years, most things are closed, but the western brand restaurants are still open and there's a KFC in walking distance. I go there, I eat, then I take the subway to the local park. I could walk there, but I didn't really feel like it at the time. It was impressively quiet, like everything was deserted or close to it. Everyone who doesn't have to work is with family, and the subways were the quietest I'd ever seen them here. I walk around the park for a while, but there's really nothing going on so I walk home. (It is walking distance, after all! It's also almost exactly two subway stops, or one from the KFC to the main entrance. There's another entrance that uses the same stop as the KFC, close to a "dumpling" place they took us to near the start of the year. SO MANY different things get translated to dumpling...)

At 5pm, almost exactly, it's like a switch flipped. There are now all of the fireworks/firecrackers going off. I think this is what my residence director was worried about, because she'd seen my reactions to random firecrackers during the semester. Thing is, there's a difference between an unexpected single loud noise (what drove me up a wall during the semester and was the final straw on one of the meltdowns) and a constant nearly omnidirectional thing that almost sounds like thunder. That's how many firecrackers there are tonight, and that's something I'm... actually totally OK with. Thunder is fine, I sleep through thunderstorms and everything. I didn't when I was really little (and people were very confused by the fact that I understood the science of why it was the lightning that was dangerous and was still very clear that it was the thunder I didn't like,) but I've been able to for a while.

I went down to the park again at this point. It's not what I'd been imagining when I said I wanted to spend the new year in China, but it was still really cool. I sat by the lake starting a bit after sundown and just watched. I was surrounded by this thunder-type sound, and I could see the sky lighting up from all the fireworks and firecrackers, and I was positioned so that I could see a lot of the (presumably illicit, definitely unofficial) displays over the lake. Most of the ones I could see were pretty short, but the fireworks used were really nice.

Eventually I got cold and took the subway back home. Then I wrote this. Now I'm tired and thinking that I'm going to have some tea and go to sleep. It was a good day. Definitely an atypical way to spend the Chinese new year, but a good one. It worked well with how my brain works, and I enjoyed it.