Saturday, February 19, 2011

Back in Chongqing

Well, vacation's over, and I'm back in Chongqing now - broke, exhausted, and thrilled with my travels. I've got a lot of catching up to do, so I'm going to continue chaotically adding new posts out of order. My apologies for the mess; hope it's not too hard to keep up.

After a month on the road, returning to my foreign home of nearly six months was utterly surreal. I couldn’t figure out if it felt more familiar or more foreign than ever. Arriving at the airport, I had the same problem I always seem to have figuring out which bus to take and where to catch it. Eventually I made it to the right bus, and we set off for downtown Chongqing just before dusk. The route we took seemed strangely indirect, winding through industrial areas and backstreets for nearly an hour before reaching the first stop, where I was to transfer to a bus into Beibei. It was great - I saw parts of Chongqing I’d never seen before, and I felt like I was on another trip instead of on the way back home. As night fell I became aware of the elaborately arranged strings of lights and red festival lanterns that lined the streets and hung from every tree and building. I’d come back just in time to catch the Lantern Festival (元宵节, Yuán xiāo jié) – the first full moon of the year, falling on the fifteenth day of the first lunar month, that marks the end of Chinese New Year celebrations.

Finally arriving back at the dorm, I gratefully ditched my bags and ran off to get a very late dinner with only my wallet in hand, neglecting to bring either my camera or my phone. After a quick tofu hotpot at the Korean place just off campus, I followed the sound of fireworks into downtown Beibei to find it festively crowded and filled with lights. Couples twirled to tinny old ballads in the central square, lit by hundreds of red lanterns and white string lights. I cursed my camera-less state and considered running back to the dorm to grab it, then decided to just try to enjoy the moment without it for once. A corridor of lights led down the street toward the river, so I followed it, stopping at a crowded bakery for a hot cup of fresh soymilk and some sticky rice cakes (元宵, yuán xiāo), which I later found out are the traditional snack of the Lantern Festival. The streets were lined with snack vendors taking advantage of the crowds – I almost regretted eating at a restaurant as I walked past the tables of veggies, tofu, noodles, seafood and meat being stirfried and grilled over charcoal fires.

I reached the promenade alongside the river and wandered the tent city of snack stalls and mah-jong tables for a while. The sky was dotted with the warm glow of drifting sky lanterns (lanterns that work like miniature hot air balloons, floating into the air with the heat from a candle or wick fixed into the wire frame at the bottom) while fireworks blossomed from sidewalks and balconies all around. I went down to the pitch-black riverbank and ate yuán xiāo, watching the groups of people that gathered around the lanterns as they filled with light and air and floated eerily off into the sky like celestial jellyfish. Eventually I remembered that I was on a hot water schedule again and tore myself away from the hypnotic scene, picking my way through the sky lantern carcasses littering the now-deserted streets and back to my dorm for my bedtime shower.

Chinese word of the day:
漂亮
piào liang
(Adj) pretty, beautiful

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