The past two days have flown by in a whirlwind of traveling around to the traditional spots where Beijingers celebrate the Spring Festival (aka Chunjie, 春节), aka the Chinese New Year. After the crazy night of fireworks on Saturday, I headed out with my friend Sandy on Sunday to find what we were told were traditional and not-so-traditional places to celebrate. The first place we headed to was a thousand year old Daoist temple in the southwestern part of the city (Bai Yun Guan Miao Hui, 白云观庙会). I think I mentioned in the last entry that there was a temple with a gate with a lucky monkey - well, what I didn't realize when I wrote the last entry was that there would be a line extending for an entire city block with people waiting to touch the monkey. There were huge signs posted "IF YOU WANT TO TOUCH THE MONKEY, STAND IN LINE AND ENTER HERE." "IF YOU DO NOT WANT TO TOUCH THE MONKEY, ENTER HERE." The signs were written in Chinese, but that's a pretty literal translation. We chose to save time and not touch the monkey (the monkeyless line was very fast) but stopped to take a look at the gate as we passed through on the other side. People of all ages would walk up and rub the monkey with both sides of their hands, and then rub their hands together as they passed through.
The Bai Yun temple was a place full of religion and superstition - you could buy coins stamped out of metal and throw them at a gong with a bell in the middle of it suspended from a bridge - if your aim was good, you could make the bell ring. There must have been close to a hundred people all throwing coins at the same time - the sound was amazing. We wandered around the temple complex - it was a maze of temples to different gods, some more important than others. There were enormous incense burners in front of the temples, and the scent of incense mixed with the sounds of bells ringing just made for a really intense experience. It was not at all what I expected. Religion does not seem to play a major role in people's lives, for a multitude of reasons, not all of them voluntary, but from what I understand, the first day of the New Year is the traditional time for people to go to temples to pray for good luck in the coming year. The one thing that really, really struck me was the security presence at the temple. There were police and other security officers everywhere we looked, and we hadn't been there for ten minutes before we saw a woman being detained. The role of the state in religion was very much on display.
After we had visited all the temples we could find (it really was a maze of worshippers), we left tradition and headed over to the southeastern corner of Beijing, to a park surrounding a lake with an amusement park to the west. A very different experience! There were significantly fewer security guards, and more young people playing typical carnival games - ring toss, basketball, even bumper cars. I bought some sequined mirror ball antennae, the thought behind which was that if people are going to look at me, I might as well give them something to look at. Plus, they were fun. We wandered around for an hour or so, bought some random food from a vendor, and called it a day. More fireworks last night, though not nearly as many as on Saturday night.
Today we headed over to Ditan Park, which was another more modernish and less religious celebration, though we managed to find the stage showing traditional dances, which was pretty fun - my favorite was the lion dance - I took some short movies with my camera, which I will have to show to people when I get back - too hard to describe. Just - there is something about two guys doing flips inside a lion costume that is just hard to beat.
After we left Ditan Park (five hours later) we were pretty exhausted, and dragged ourselves back to the subway and back home. We stopped by a Kodak place to get passport photos taken (for the school in Harbin), where, despite the best efforts of the woman behind the counter not to help us (note to woman behind the counter: if you want me to understand what you're saying, speak slower, and lose the unintelligible accent - I think the clearest thing she said in Chinese was, "You're not understanding a single thing I'm saying!" to which I thought, (but didn't say), "Ha! I understood that!"). I mean, there are so many people here who are incredibly patient, and talk me through things to figure out what I want (like the woman behind the counter at Dairy Queen), but there are others who just go out of their way to make it clear that they don't understand what you want, and they don't really care. Argh.
ok - time is running out - I am off to go watch more Jay Chou music videos. You don't know who Jay Chou is? go google him now!
