Apparently, part of this ceremony also entails having someone “wear” a donkey costume and dance around in front of the bride-carriers to help keep the party “re nao” (loud and spirited, a good thing in China).  Guess who got to be the donkey wearer?

Pictures here.

This morning in Chinese class one of my classmates was telling a story of how her cat recently came into heat and with that was making loud noises (apparently the official term is “caterwauling”) keeping her and her roommate up at night. All the cats in the city must be on the same schedule because I’ve definitely noticed the noises coming from the strays that live in the courtyard of my apartment complex. To those of you who haven’t had the pleasure of listening to a caterwauling cat, let me say that I can think of more disturbing noises but it might take me a while. My classmate ended up taking her cat to the vet to get that special surgery and since then they’ve been sleeping soundly (or at least without noise from the cat). While my classmate was telling this story, I thought it would be funny to interject my own rendition of caterwauling. My classmates were not amused and especially not my teacher who turned to me after I did it a second time and told me to stop it or she would take me to the doctor to get a surgery done. I didn’t make one peep after that.

Check.

2. Ride an elephant.

Check.

3. Drive a motorcycle 450 miles through some of the prettiest country the world has to offer on some of the the funnest roads the world has to offer.

Check.

4. Eat a ton of Thai food.

Check.

5. Wake up in the middle of the night with stomach pains and that afternoon have an emergency appendectomy.

Check.

It’s been an eventful week.

The culprit. (lovely view from my friends apartment)

I’m leaving my apartment if under half an hour for Thailand, me and Mr. Sun have some catching up to do.

Creager out.

The last couple of months, for no particular reason besides being lazy and liking a warm face while biking in the cold, I have been growing out my beard.  China is kind of a wasteland when it comes to facial hair (I’m not sure where movie makers get the idea that all Chinese villains and/or wise sages have Fu Manchus because I cannot recall having seen a good one yet) so it was fun to see what people did when they noticed.  Some of the more memorable reactions:

• One of my friends here helps take care of a little boy who is in transit from an orphanage to being adopted.  He’s pretty clingy to my friend but we took him swimming one day and when in the vicinity of my beard he would get this look of wonderment in his eye, let go of my friend, come over to me and start petting my beard like it was an cat or dog.  He was absolutely memorized by it. Hilarious.
• A worker at a parking lot joked with me when I dropped my bike off asking if I was La Deng (Osama bin Laden) and that he was going to arrest me and turn me in for a $10 million reward.  Not sure where he got that figure because the internet says it’s actually $50 million but either way, that’s a lot of money for a Chinese parking lot attendant.
• A friend and I were walking down the street when we passed by a group of guys sitting out in front of a store.  They saw me and started to chuckle and talk amongst themselves then one of them yelled something at me. I didn’t understand what they said so I asked my friend and he told me they asked if I needed help finding a razor.
• This isn’t Chinese-related but my sister is working in Switzerland as a nanny for a family with two kids ages 5 and 3.  One day when I was video chatting with her the kids came in and saw my picture on the computer. They dubbed me Monsieur Moustache (she’s in the French speaking part of Switzerland) and from then on whenever I talk with her and they are around, they always yell out “Monsieur Moustache! Monsieur Moustache!” She tells the story better, complete with pictures, on her blog here.

It was fun to have the beard for a while but it made eating a pretty messy ordeal – I’ve never used so many napkins in my life. Plus, I’m headed back to Thailand in a  couple of days when we have break for Chinese New Year (It totally makes up for only getting two days off for Christmas when you can have five weeks off a couple of weeks later) and I wanted to avoid getting a weird tan.  So the beard had to go but there was still some humor left in it on its way out.

Fortunately there is a growing alternative music scene here and a couple of weeks ago I went to a decent punk rock concert. The band was Brain Failure which was one of the first punk bands in China and apparently have played some shows in the States. I had no idea what the lead singer was saying, even when he was speaking English, but the music was good, the band was tight and the crowd was into it. And let’s just be honest, after not having been to a good live show in over a year, any band playing music in a genre I enjoyed and seemed at least halfway skilled would have been great. One of the highlights of the night was when the power went out and the lead singer got the crowd singing until they could get the power back on. I took some video of the concert but I must warn that the audio quality is less than stellar. The first two videos are of when the power was off and the last video is of them playing their hit song, Coming Down to Beijing.

I’m going to bed.

Back of The Dark Knight packaging, say what?

Watching most movies at home on a small TV set or computer screen usually isn’t that big of a deal until it comes to a big action movie and then you’re left with wanting a bit more from your movie-viewing experience. That’s when the projector comes in. My friend has one for business purposes but is very generous in loaning it out for the occasional movie viewing so when I finally tracked down a good copy of The Dark Knight the projector made a visit to my house.

Projector setup

The camera flash whited out the picture, it’s a lot clearer in the dark.

I have been to one movie here, the new James Bond film Quantum of Solace. I got a few friends together to watch the midnight showing on opening night. Unfortunately, I didn’t find out until we got to the theater that it was only being shown in with a Chinese audio track. So we came back later that day (22 hours later) and watched it in English. I didn’t realize it at the time but that movie premiered a week early in China to try to combat it being pirated. Apparently, that method worked pretty well because watchable copies didn’t show up on the internet. It did not, however, stop me from watching it again last night on a $1 disc bought off the street.

The first and third weddings I went to was with a friend’s family that are part of the Hui minority group so this type of ceremony is not very common. There was a banquet during the day where a ton of people came and ate but later on in the evening some family members got black shoe polish and chains together. They grabbed the groom (and in one case the best man as well), painted their faces with the shoe polish, wrapped chains around their necks and locked them up outside on the sidewalk for everybody to see. This drew a crowd and soon people were circling around hurling insults, and sometimes objects, at the poor groom. He just took it too, a defeated but determined look in his eye, waiting for midnight when he could pay the people that locked him up for the keys to free himself. While all this was going on the guests, those not abusing the groom, continued eating food that the groom’s family made.

They even put flowers in their hair.

This just looks uncomfortable

A friend took some video of the whole event.

More pictures of these weddings here and here.

The second wedding I went to was much more in line with the “traditional” way of Chinese weddings. It was held in a big hotel with a ton of tables, I heard over 60, with 10 people at each table. There was a ceremony that included indoor fireworks and the groom singing a sappy love song to his bride. An emcee was hired to keep up the 热闹 （re nao; lively, excitement-filled) atmosphere so he sang songs and had the bride and groom play games with their families. Then came time for the toasting. The bride and groom go around to every table to thank them for coming. Each table had a bottle of strong liquor (that was replaced at our table when the first one was emptied), a bottle of wine, and a case of beer. I was sitting at a table with a bunch of the groom’s college buddies and they got him to drink a lot – he wasn’t doing too much complaining either. In the picture below that glass is half-full with 50+% liquor.

Obviously there’s no way he could have done that at each of the 60 tables so I’m not sure how he managed those but it was no surprise to me when I heard he didn’t make it much longer after the ceremony before calling it a night at around 3pm.

More pictures of this wedding, and of me driving motorcycles, here.

To be fair, I’m sure there have been some wonderful weddings in China where the groom has not been abused or expected to get slooshed off their rocker but I haven’t attended any of those so we’re going with what we know here.

In other news what is quickly becoming my favorite day of the year, November 14th, was again a great day this year. That’s right, it’s the day the heat gets turned on! I was pretty excited about it last year and this year even more so. And right now I’m thinking you can’t get too much of a good thing. I want to turn my apartment into a sauna.

In other, other news this last month I’ve attended three different weddings. Pictures are up and hopefully some write-ups will appear on here soonly.