救火 is save fire
our prc friends brought us out to 玩玩 yesterday (i love that they call outings 出去玩玩 chu1 qu4 wan2 wan2, there's something very nice and innocent about it), and we started the day by going to the lama temple where i hung around outside the buildings where the statues were housed, in the foggy after-rain morning, choking on the smoke from burning incense, observing the various temple-goers with much amusement.

and i was rewarded shortly when two bundles of incense which a short fat man was trying to light caught fire.

it looked like he was holding torches fit to light the way in the dark of night, and he also looked as if he was afraid that he would burn himself. in fact, i was afraid he would.

he hurriedly raised them up and down three times and threw them into the incense trough.

maybe it was a bundle of dried sticks, not incense.

i also saw people burning yellow and gold paper folded into the shape of ingots, which i didn't understand, because why do the gods need money? i asked one of our prc friends about it, and i think he said that it was to curry favour with the gods on behalf of dead family members. in fact, i think he even said something which can be translated to mean bribery.

but my chinese is still rather half past-six, so don't take my word for it.

if only
yesterday our professor for law of international sales, finance and carriage didn't come again. with a name like john shijian mo, you just know he's too busy trying to advance his career outside of being a professor to really care about teaching.

anyway, over breakfast jinni said let's visit the great wall, just like we would have said let's go catch a movie back in singapore, if class was cancelled. a clear blue sky, barely any wind - the day was perfect.

we even made it back in time for jinni's modern chinese history class, which i attended with her. since most of my modules are of the mind-numbingly boring kind, being 双语课 - taught in english and chinese, not much more than exercises in translation - i have decided that i will go on doing this, because classes taught in chinese are infinitely more interesting and fulfilling.

for instance, yesterday, i slept for half of jinni's class, and she woke me up in the second half to watch a video on 圆明园, which made me feel extremely angry at westerners for being power-hungry imperialists and stealing china's national treasures and refusing to return them, even now.

this is what it's like to trace one's roots i guess. haha.

sardines

all of beijing is busy getting ready for the olympics, and one day i think i'm going to stand in front of the huge electronic billboard at the end of the expressway on the way to school, and take down all the slogans which flash past. my favourite one so far is 我奉献、我参与、我快乐 (wo3 feng4 xian3, wo3 can1 yu2, wo3 kuai4 le4) - i'm contributing, i'm participating, i'm happy. there's just something very communistically (is that a word) optimistic about it.

and you wonder where the singapore government's penchant for slogans came from.

there's also 迎奥运、讲文明、树新风 (yin2 ao4 yun4, jiang3 wen2 ming2, shu4 xin1 feng1) - as we welcome the olympics, let us be gracious and put aside past habits.

at the bus stops during the morning and evening rush hours, there are about four or five senior citizens, usually fat, red-cheeked old women- 阿姨 - dressed in the bright blue and yellow uniforms of the beijing transport services. yesterday i noticed that they wore tags on long cords around their necks which said that they were 文明员 (wen2 ming2 yuan2). their titles might have been slightly more descriptive, but i was running to the bus when i noticed the tags and couldn't see them properly. anyhow, from those three words one can gather that they're, quite literally, gracious people helpers - i.e. they're there to help create a more gracious beijing.

which they do by waving little red flags and telling people to line up in orderly queues to get on the bus.

it doesn't work.

and these 阿姨 usually end up helping people to get onto an already full-to-bursting bus (if buses could burst), by shoving and pushing and cramming them against those already on the bus, holding them there until the bus door folds closed and they can't fall out.

i sacrificed a loaf of bread that way the other day, because it costs eight singapore cents to take the bus and at least two singapore dollars to take a cab on your own.

once you're on the bus, the bus driver and conductor will holler for passengers who've just boarded to move towards the back, which one can endeavour to but will usually fail to do. i spend my time on buses wedged tightly between people, praying very hard that i'll be able to move towards the exit and be right in front of it when the bus door opens at my stop.

the bus conductor yesterday morning couldn't see his side-view mirror due to the sheer mass of people blocking it. after hollering very irritably for people to move aside, he swerved and someone shouted from behind 你会驾车吗 do you know how to drive?

i say, these people have never died before.

in other news, the central heating has been centrally turned off, heralding the arrival of spring! which, unfortunately, appears merely to be stirring slightly from her hibernation. we thought it was just the wind making it cold in our apartment, but i realised yesterday that the heaters, which used to give out a faint but sufficiently cosy heat, are now Stone Cold.

here is a very interesting picture:

i never saw a chinese emporer so dark, even though we were at the summer palace
don't think they went tanning in those days

i really think i look like a right old prat, but maybe not, because you can tell i was trying Very Hard not to laugh. jinni said i couldn't show my teeth, whether when smiling or otherwise, because then i wouldn't look like a proper ge ge (daughter of emperor). shangren couldn't get his costumes right, he captioned a picture of xiaoyun (as a manchurian princess), him and me on facebook Me and my 2 concubines.

anyway, you can see the dustbins in the background.

this is a 煎饼 （jian1 bing3)
right, i don't quite know what 煎饼 translates into, so for now you can just think of it as a "pancake- thing". it's another cheap local delight sold on the streets, and is made on the spot with batter spooned onto a hot griddle. an egg is then cracked onto the batter, followed by chopped spring onions, and lastly a large piece of fried beancurd skin is crushed on top of everything and the entire thing is folded together and placed, steaming, in a plastic bag for you to burn your tongue on. well, for me to burn my tongue on anyway.

but there are no photos of it, because this post isn't actually about them. the title of this post actually refers to a joke jinni, xiaoyun and i made during our weekend trip to 承德 （cheng2 de2), where emperor kang xi (康熙皇帝) built a summer palace (避暑山庄 bi4 shu3 shan1 zhuang1). unfortunately, the details of the joke cannot be divulged here because they are potentially libellous.

***
so, i spent most of holy saturday crammed into a seat, knees almost to my chest, in a Very Dodgy bus with Very Furry, dirt encrusted seats, praying that the oncoming cars and massive trucks laden with things like donkeys and swivel chairs would be able to swerve in time, because our bus driver cut corners at high speeds and sometimes undertook to overtake other vehicles at road bends. there was an old man next to me who started smoking, and i pointedly opened the window about half-way but he didn't seem to get the point. his cigarette butt ended up on the floor of the bus along with hundreds of melon seed shells and eventually his water bottle, but that wasn't before my cheeks were almost frozen from the wind-rush coming in through the half-opened window. because the bus was, of course, going at a speed above the speed limit. even with its rickety suspension and the going-to-fall-apart sounds it was making, which the driver seemed totally oblivious to.

imagine me, then, in three layers, bundled up in my dad's blue goose down windbreaker which is 5 sizes too big for me, crammed into aforementioned seat, sticking my head ever so slightly out the window to the godforsaken country road.

i spent the time before dinner on holy saturday looking at huge representations of gods which i thought looked like fat old men who'd had too much to drink and decided to dress up for a lark, then became angry when others laughed at how ridiculous they looked, faces set in a permanent scowl. or maybe they were scowling because a number of joss sticks being offered to them were stuck in little paper cups of ashes bearing the words 超市发 (chao1 shi4 fa1), china's answer to giant, on them.

and i ushered in resurrection sunday with a scaldingly hot shower - the tap at the hotel didn't seem to be able to register an in-between temperature, so you had to choose between scaldingly hot and icy cold - and that was followed by a walk, during which i blew out smokey breath to my hearts' content, to breakfast at the local sunday morning market; chalky white soya bean milk, poured from huge thermos flasks into bowls, eaten at tables set up by the road next to a shop where a man was sawing window parts. it was bland but had a sweet, burnt aftertaste and a grittiness when your tongue met undissolved bits of sugar. that was accompanied by the lightest, crispest 油条 (you2 tiao2) i've ever eaten, fresh from a pot of hot, bubbling oil seated on the back of a wheelbarrow, cooked by a man with cheeks chapped and red from the cold.

and, as i had a spoonful of beancurd with soya sauce and bits of spring onion, i turned to jinni and xiaoyun and told them that i was happy.

***
it was probably the happiest resurrection sunday i've ever had in my entire life, and i mean that. the time during the service in 2007 when we sang because He lives was probably the only other time in all my 21 years that i even came close to feeling that perfectly happy.

because it dawned on me, along with the cold morning in an industrial town a few hundred kilometres off beijing, that this was what Jesus died on the cross for. these moments of the Everyday kind of happiness, only made possible by His perfect peace in our hearts.

later in the day, we went to a temple and i wandered off on my own feeling a little sad because our tour guide had gotten a little Too Insistent about offering incense to kuanyin, as a mark of respect, regardless of your religion and beliefs, she kept saying. a lot of westerners do.

i wanted to cry.

imagine, then, me standing on the steps leading to the temple, looking out at the glorious hills and rock formations in the distance, singing because He lives softly to myself, holding my water bottle tightly in my hands and feeling less alone.

but greater still, the calm assurance
this child can face uncertain days because He lives

paul said he thought the fat old men gods had to look fierce to chase away evil spirits. i think they were scowling because they knew, deep in their hearts, that there was a God far greater than them all, that they were ultimately worth nothing and would fade into obscurity once people forgot about them and moved on to other gods.

***
on the way home i saw snow for the first time: sad, thinning patches of it on a brown barren land as yet untouched by spring. whose appearance, it must be said, would have been greatly improved by several layers of snow. there's something very clean about cold air and newly fallen snow as it's described in storybooks that would have gone a long way towards hiding the poverty, the dilapidated industrial buildings and houses, the rubbish scattered all about the fields and trees. and it would have made the fact that there were children bundled up in brightly coloured clothes running around seem less sad. we also stopped at a functioning petrol station for a toilet break, and the toilet was little more than three drains set about a foot apart in concrete behind an unfinished brick wall. all three drains were choked with tissue paper, soiled sanitary pads and faeces.

i decided i could wait.

we took a bus which was Definitely Very Much Less Dodgy back to beijing, and by the end of the journey we wished we'd taken the Very Dodgy bus of the journey to 承德. the windows couldn't open, so whenever someone smoked we'd feel like we were slowly suffocating as the smoke diffused towards us. and to top it all off, during the last third of the journey one of the bus staff decided to put on a chinese techno ktv dvd, complete with girls dressed like Complete Skanks singing nonsense in chinese on the tiny tv screen at the front of the bus.

we got off the bus with Awful Headaches.

but a taxi ride, washing machine cycle and shower later, i thankfully made a cup of 3 in 1 milo - which is one of the most comforting things in the world, late at night. the wind shrieked and howled outside (like it's doing now) but inside my apartment i was draining the last of my milo, the pounding techno beats leaving my head, a brown sludge remaining at the bottom of my mug which would harden by the next morning because i'm too lazy to wash things immediately here.