China ended a drought with the use cloud seeding technologies? This article thinks the technology is unproven. Still very interesting.
Category: Beijing
Although it’s a little late, I thought I would write something about what I got up to on New Years Eve here in BJ. Don’t get too excited though I didn’t stay up all night and watch the sunrise while sipping champagne on the great wall (come to think of it that would have been fun).
First, I went with some classmates to Sizzler – yes, it still exists, I will post a picture of it soon as proof. You will probably remember it as a sub-par chain restaurant where the all you can eat salad/dessert bar came with free hair, skin flakes and on weekends salmonella. Well ok, perhaps not that bad, but I don’t exactly recall fondly my dining experiences there. However, in China Sizzler is actually pretty good, especially the all-you-can-eat salad bar. Although the meals are somewhat expensive and small, because the salad bar is good it makes up for it.
Anyhoo, after dinner we thought something might be happening at either Tiananmen Square or Wangfujing st, so we first headed down to Tiananmen to see what was happening. I should say that before the night my housemate had told me there was nothing interesting in those places but I didn’t listen 
. We arrived at Tiananmen sqr. to find it blocked off so you couldn’t enter, and there were police and sort of security guards around to make sure people didn’t jump the temporary fencing. Actually I’m not too surprised they are not keen to encourage a gathering of mostly young, and perhaps roudy, youth to that particular location. Moving on, we decided to head to Wangfujing (plan b). This was also mostly a fizzer. There were lots of groups of other foreigners floating around on the night, it seemed like we were all in search of Beijing’s New Years ‘Shangri La’ that was nowhere to be found.
We ended up spending the countdown to 2007 in Wangfujing surrounded by a few other groups of strangers – but by all means not a times-square sort of atmosphere. There is a reasonably large clock in Wangfujing so we all watched that as the final minutes ticked down to the new year. It was funny actually because although the bell rang a few times and there was some cheering and elation. It must have been about 5 minutes after 12 when the lights all went out. Then a couple of minutes later a cop car rolled down the street to make sure no hooliganism had broken out (I guess). But they should be commended for doing their jobs, I saw them make someone put out a sparkler which could have posed a risk to other revelers *note sarcasm*.
Nonetheless, it was a ‘different’ New Years Eve and although it would have been good to have had a bit more atmosphere, – and perhaps fireworks – I’m sure I will get my dose of that come Chinese New Year.
The last two days it has snowed in Beijing! It’s the first real downpour? this winter, a winter that has been warm by Beijing standards. I hadn’t looked at the weather report the day before so in the morning I looked out my window to see everything covered in a white sheet of snow! It’s pretty cool since I’ve never lived in a city with snow before. Here are some pics…
Christmas was an interesting one this year. Although I missed out on a big family gathering back in Melbourne, it was interesting to experience Christmas in another country (however snow came a little late so I still havn’t had a white Christmas 
)
Firstly, I was surprised by how much Christmas is celebrated over here, mostly by the younger generations. Also, shops/restaurants also ‘celebrate’ Christmas and cash in on the Christmas spirit. Most shops had Christmas sales and restaurants had special Christmas/Christmas eve dinners and events.
Christmas eve I went out with friends from Uni to a North African restaurant which wasn’t anything special, but we did win some prizes (soft plush toys) because they had a door raffle and some game/event sort of things. Oh and they also had belly dancer who was dancing while holding a real snake of some sort, and who put the snake around various customers necks and that sort of thing.
After dinner we went to a karaoke place and sung some songs till about 1:30am. The trip home was interesting because the taxi driver didn’t turn off a road when he should have, and it wasn’t going to be very easy to do a u-turn or go back the other way. So, waiting until some police nearby (driving) were out of site, he proceeded to go against traffic to get back to our turn off (in the service lane at 1:45 in the morning so rest assured it wasn’t dangerous, or at least I didn’t feel like it was). But it made for an interesting end to the night.
The next day (Christmas day) I slept in till about 1pm haha. After giving my family a call I planned to go out to eat Japanese with friends from Uni. However, the restaurant was closed by 2:30ish when we arrived. So, we went to another nearby all-you-can-eat buffet. As it turned out, because it was Christmas day, they had a massive roast turkey which although missing cranberry sauce was cooked to perfection! So, in the end I got a roast dinner – but not a white – Christmas.
The end.
Merry (belated) Christmas.
I was coming home from a Violin lesson this evening when I saw something that gave me a really bad impression of society in China.
Basically, everyday between 5pm-7pm there are seriously traffic jams on the roads, think 1km an hour, bumper-to-bumper. So, I got off and started walking home.
On the footpath ahead of me I noticed a couple walking along, the guy was grasping the girls hair and it looked like he was forcing her to walk along. Anyway, over the next few minutes he proceeded to beat her several times (open handed strikes to the face/head) and basically just rough her up, push her about, grab her hair, head locks etc. Then he walked her a bit further, stopped again and had her in a choke hold as he pushed her repeatedly against a fence.
I was basically watching this shocked and not knowing what to do. I wanted to do something, but Chinese people just walked passed or looked on and didn’t do or say anything.
I’ve heard that foreigners shouldn’t get involved in things in China so I didn’t want to directly confront the guy. Also I sort of expected other people to do something. I don’t want to be ethnocentric, but in Australia he would be the one who got beaten up if there were other people nearby.
Anyway, I couldn’t just do nothing so I asked an onlooker if there were any police nearby, he said maybe up ahead a little bit. At this time the couple were walking along again, well the guy was making the girl walk along (i should say that they were probabaly 30-40ish, not too sure). At the same time i didn’t want to run off in-case he started punching or really getting stuck into her, anyway, cause it had sort of cooled down, I hurried ahead to look for Police.
Having not found any, and not knowing what to do, I went back to where they were before and they were still there. The girl was sort of standing cowering and the guy was still looking threatening, then he sort of hit and pushed her again. So, i went back to a nearby intersection and asked one of the people controlling traffic if there were any police nearby.
As I was asking, a couple walked by and asked what was wrong, so I told them and got them to follow me to have a look. I pointed out the couple to them, at this point he wasn’t doing too much, but did slap her and pull her her roughly. The chinese couple turned to me and said in Chinese: “perhaps they are lovers”. At this point I was just sort of shocked by the lack of willingness of others to help the girl getting abused. I asked them if it was acceptable in China for a guy to hit a girl, and they just looked at me, then said thankyou for telling them.
At this point I decided that I had tried to help out, but there was nothing to be done. I just shook my head at them not understanding how they could have no concern, and continued home.
Wow. Long post! Had to write it down, it was seriously strange coming from a culture where if a guy pushed a girl or even threatened to hit her, onlookers would almost certainly step in or at least call some form of authority to do something. I know this attitude has a cultural background in Daoism/Confucianism (not that they advocate this behaviour) and also in more modern historical events (50’s to 70’s), but it seems like womens rights in China still have a long way to go. Its funny because on TV there are ads encouraging people to help out fellow citizens (in preparation for 2008), seems like there is still a way to go…
As a foreigner, you pretty much always pay more for things when you shop in China. The obvious places are when you have to bargain for something. You can pay anything from 3 to like 10 times what you ’should’ pay. Some places are better than others, shops with prices are usually ok but anywhere without prices you are going to get ripped off.
But, this isn’t always true. See, things at the shop in the foreign lodgings dorm building (where I am) cost more than all the other shops around campus. It’s like an officially condoned practice.