A Nice Day for a Chinese Wedding

Today was Fiona and Stephen’s wedding and we were all invited.  Fiona is one of our best Chinese friends (and Terry’s co-teacher this year) and it was great to see what a real Chinese wedding is like.  As with everything in China, it was quite the experience…

We arrived at the venue, the ‘7 Star Hotel’ (wishful thinking, Pingxiang), just before 8am.  The room was elaborately decorated in white and red with lots of shiny lights and this great big fake cake.  A cruel, cruel joke if ever I saw one.

Fiona and Stephen arrived and posed for some photos.  Here’s the beautiful couple.

Then we all had photos with them.  Not sure who the children are; I think they were just for show.

The ceremony kicked off in style.  Lots of flashing lights, announcements on microphones and dramatic music that sounded like something out of Pirates of the Caribbean.  Then it all went dark and quiet, a spotlight was shone on the aisle and Fiona and Stephen entered, singing in Chinese.  They walked onto the stage and finished singing to each other amidst bubbles and smoke and the like.  It was really sweet but certainly such cheese can only be acceptable in Asia.

A video was played, which was a composition of little videos we’d all made for the couple wishing them joy and happiness etc.  Then the ceremony began.  It was mostly in Chinese, apart from the vows which were in English.  Because Terry was the ‘priest’.  I couldn’t get a photo because I was too busy filming the happy event, but it was great.

Fiona and Stephen both said personal vows to each other in Chinese and there was not a dry female eye in the house.  I didn’t know what they were saying but it was very moving.

After the ceremony was over, Jav and Taz sang a love song in Chinese, X Factor style.

Then there was a banquet.  It was still only about 9.30am at this point but the red wine and the ‘liqueur’ came out, as did the chicken feet.

We took some more photos.

After this we traipsed to Fiona’s parents’ house, finishing off our wine as we went.  True British class, right there.

At Fiona’s was a strange ritual where all the girls tried to prevent Stephen coming into the room.  Until he gave us all money; then we let him in.

He then 'took Fiona away'.  It was quite an emotional occasion as she had to say goodbye to her parents, symbolically leaving the family forever and joining Stephen’s family.

Next, we headed to Fiona and Stephen’s new apartment to eat giant fruit.

At some point everyone left the apartment, including Fiona and Stephen.  After a while we decided it might be time for us to leave too.  So we wandered back to the college.

In summary, it was a beautiful (if a tad flashy) wedding for a beautiful bride.  “Happy Marriage Date”, Stephen and Fiona!

Food

So, food in Pingxiang.  In short, it’s very good.  If you don’t mind chillies in everything and the occasional bit of toad.

There’s a lot more variety in food than I thought there would be so we don’t get bored of it.  Though I do still miss things like milk, cereal and real bread.  The bread is very cunning here, no matter how normal it looks you can guarantee there's some sugar in there somewhere.

For breakfast, if you can be bothered to get up that half hour earlier, there’s a nice lady on Backdoor street who sells both steamed and boiled dumplings (baozi and jiaozi) with no way of telling what’s inside.  Sometimes it’s meat, sometimes pickled vegetables, sometimes chopped up hot-dog.  But it all tastes good and who doesn’t want a lucky dip breakfast at 7am?

That's a bucket of chilli sauce, by the way.  Perfectly within the grounds of health and safety.

Lunch is in the canteen and is also a bit of a gamble.  Generally I avoid the meat but pigs’ ears sometimes disguise themselves as mushrooms and we think they put extra bones in the fish just for fun.  Vegetables are ok – cabbage is apparently very important to the Chinese but they manage to make it taste nice.

We usually go out for dinner as it would probably be more expensive and definitely more disastrous to cook for ourselves.  Dinner is a really social thing for the Chinese: you order dishes between the group and share them all.  Chopstick skills are essential here.  Most restaurants serve the same type of food so we order our favourites: xiao chao rou (stir-fried pork), shou si bou cai (hand torn cabbage) and mao dou (fried soy beans), to name but a few.

Punk, our favourite restaurant owner buddy and fellow teacher at the college (Punk is a busy man), has made us an English menu, so we are branching out with leek, chilli potato, interesting beef and the like.

Sometimes we go out to a speciality dumpling restaurant in town.  We finally worked out that you order them in portions of 6 so were able to stop accidentally getting piles and piles of them.  Being forced to finish dozens somehow detracts from the pleasure of the dumpling experience.

Then there's hot pot.  Hot pot is a Chinese speciality, originally from Sichuan province (and no.5 in the Rough Guide’s list of ‘34 things not to miss in China’, don’t you know) and it’s very popular.  There are only a few hot pot places in Pingxiang and if you go to the most popular one you actually have to fight a bit for a table.  But it’s worth it.  It’s basically a big fondue type meal with 2 different soups boiling in the centre of the table to cook meat, fish balls, vegetables, tofu and all good things in.  In the case of hot pot it really is the more the merrier as it seems to be cheaper the more people that eat.  Just another confusing Chinese discounting scheme.

Fast food wise, the Chinese like fried food.  Of course, the students will lie and say they don’t, because they don’t like to appear unhealthy, but the presence of a KFC on every corner in the big cities suggests otherwise.  At the bottom of Backdoor Street, fake KFC, or 'Marks' Chicken, is great, but you can’t trust the menu as they just printed it from KFC and don’t actually have the same food in.  Then there are other, cheaper unhealthy options.  On backdoor street, fried-food lady will fry pretty much anything, on sticks, in a very delicious manner.  And this bread stuff is amazing.

On the whole, then, no complaints about food here.  Though I’m not a fan of snake.  And one dish we were served was bright purple.

Fishing in China

One day, Bob decided to take us fishing.  It turned out to be a faculty event, with deans and vice-deans and a couple of wives and one 12-year old boy, who was called Lee in the morning but had changed his name to Cowboy by the afternoon.  Here he is holding a very small and sweet puppy in my face.

It was a nice sunny day and we were out in the real countryside, at a very small lake behind some houses where people were drying peanuts.  

I've never been fishing before but I had a sneaky suspicion something wasn't quite right when the fishing masters started attaching bits of grass to the rods as bait.  They later maintained that the grass attracted the bigger fish but not a single fish was caught in this way and 31 fish were caught when they caved and cracked out the earthworms.

It was quite peaceful, sitting there in the sun, and I ended up catching 11 fish, once I got the hang of it.

Bob wasn’t quite so lucky.  He was missing for most of the morning and occasionally we’d see him rooting around in the undergrowth on the opposite side of the lake.

No fish to show for his hilarious efforts though.

Here’s our bag of fish.

After we’d finished, Bob took us to a restaurant where we had another banquet and ate the fish we’d caught.  I won’t lie, they did not taste great.  But novelty is flavour enough.

The next day, Eric, one of our fishing companions, brought round an enormous fish for us (again in a plastic bag), and insisted that we’d caught it the day before.  This statement was ridiculous, because we were all fully aware of the pitifully tiny fish we’d caught; also, the bag was quite obviously from a supermarket.  But we ate that fish for dinner all the same.

Nanchang

This week is National Week, a fictional holiday created by the party for all the extra money made by massively increasing travel costs, but a holiday nonetheless!  Since it was too expensive to go anywhere we decided on a weekend trip to Nanchang, the capital of Jiang Xi province.  We managed to get cheap train tickets, but this meant the slow train, which took over 4 hours each way.  Trains here are not completely different to trains in England but they are much more crowded, you can just throw rubbish on the floor and whoever sits opposite you will take photos of you.  Sometimes they’ll ask first.  Also, sometimes chickens travel by train.

Our first calling point when we reached Nanchang was…McDonalds.  A month’s denial of cheese, dairy products and low grade beef will turn McDonalds into an incredible luxury.  Here’s Jav showing Ronald some love.

Next we looked for a hotel.  Just around the corner from the station was this picturesque street.

It’s resemblance to post-war Eastern Europe and the total absence of stable ground convinced us it was the right choice of location.  After some very difficult miming, me and Terry somehow managed to get some kind of luxury room with an electric Mahjong table, where playing pieces magically arranged themselves in a spinning pit beneath the table.  Here’s us pretending to know how to play.

We then headed to Tengwang Pavillion, Nanchang’s top attraction.

It’s 9 floors in total, including the outside levels, and we walked up all of them, looking at different paintings and cultural artefacts along the way.  At the top there was a show going on, and outside there were some pretty gardens.

We then walked to You Min Temple, described as ‘huge’ by our guide book.  It didn’t look huge.

But then there another part to it.  Complete with monks blessing a car just in front of it.  Noone knows why.

We wandered back through the central park of the city.  Parks are where Chinese community really reveals itself – there are people playing badminton, men playing Mahjong, big groups of people just discussing or debating things, a big public TV screen, children’s rides, families painting pots, even a special few doing karaoke!

We took a pedal boat out on the lake which was fun, after we escaped from the many boats trying to follow us around and take pictures.

After pizza for dinner and a drink in the city centre we headed back to the hotel.  Since Nanchang is a much bigger city than Pingxiang, traffic was even scarier there. Chinese driving tip no.4: If you can see 3 lanes on the road, consider 5.  There’s plenty of room to squeeze through.  And don’t worry about the police; they’ll be the ones in the 5^th lane, driving the wrong way down the road.

The next day me and Terry went to the ‘Star of Nanchang’, the world’s second biggest ferris wheel.

It confused me as to why they decided to build it in Nanchang, of all places.  It was good, but since Nanchang isn’t the most exciting city there wasn’t much to see.  There was the river, with the current city on one side and the developing new city on the other.  You can see it here on the left; it’s all springing up rapidly but at the moment just looks like a skeleton of a city; empty buildings and lots of half-designed areas.

On the way back we stopped off at Walmart for chocolate, which was right next to People’s Square, a communist style park, all concrete with a big important looking statue at one end.

On the train ride back we were sitting opposite a couple and their son, who spoke a little English, so I used the time to try and learn bits of Chinese.

And that was Nanchang.  It was good to get away from the college for a bit and see some more of China.  We even managed to avoid any serious scamming by taxi drivers and the like…until we arrived back in Pingxiang and someone tried to rip us off by about 9 times the usual fare.  He foolishly got out at traffic lights to ask for directions, so we ran for it.

To conclude: the latest piece of ingenious translation, on a toilet door on the train.

When I first read it I thought it made complete sense.  I am clearly adjusting well.