all the things I was missing in Canada. It was the first time in my twenty-seven years I hadnât been with my family on Christmas.
It was a white Christmas in Beijing, but not in the Bing Crosby sense. Outside the office windows, the sky was a toxic white haze of suffocating pollution. The hours passed by glacially. My colleagues and I took a long lunch and exchanged gifts. We tried to put on happy faces, but it didnât work.
For the first time, I was truly homesick.
E very year during the Chinese Lunar New Year, otherwise known as Spring Festival, occurs the largest human migration on earth. In the span of forty days, almost three billion passenger trips are made around the country. Train stations become desperate seas of humanity, where anxious travelers camp for days and weeks to purchase tickets that sell out in minutes. For many of Chinaâs 200 millionâplus migrant workers, the Lunar New Year is the one chance they have each year to return home, the one chance to see family and friends.
For me, escape from Beijing was imperative as well. During Spring Festival, the entire city goes on a massive fireworks binge at all hours of the day and night. For three consecutive days that February, I had been going about my routine amid constant explosions, waking up at dawn to deafening pop-pop-pop s, car alarms, and children squealing. For a day, the fireworks are pretty cool, an entire city of eighteen million alight with dangerous explosives that can be purchased on any street corner. After two days, itâs annoying. By day three or four, thoughts creep to murder.
I was anxious to begin exploring the country again. My life felt lazy and routine: work, DVDs, dinner/drinks, rinse, repeat. I wanted some excitement, and Harbin, a city in northeast China, seemed to offer it. A colleague had visited Harbin a few weeks earlier and stumbled upon a rare attraction: bears wrestling while wearing capes. The strange event occurred at the site of Harbinâs annual ice festival, which featured ice replicas of the Acropolis, the Egyptian pyramids, the Eiffel Tower, and other famous landmarks. My colleague spoke highly of the cityâs vodka-fueled nightlife, and taken together it seemed crazy enough to warrant a look.
I had a few days off and many of my friends, including Julia, were out of town. Through China Daily âs travel agency, Jeremy, Ben, and I managed to buy tickets to Harbin, capital of Heilongjiang province, nine hours to the north, near Siberia.
We took a morning train and arrived in late afternoon. The temperature was minus twenty degrees Celsius. We promptly took a taxi to an ice bar on the main street and downed shots of vodka under a pair of reindeer horns harnessed to the ice wall.
Fortified for the cold, we walked toward the yellowish glow of Harbinâs ice city, not far from downtown. Hundreds of families, bundled up in layers of winter clothing, snapped photos in front of ice sculptures and buildings lit up in red, yellow, green, and blue. I followed my colleagueâs instructions to the back of the ice city, where she had spotted the wrestling bears a few weeks earlier. We climbed to the top of the Acropolis and spotted the venue we sought: a rest area with Nescafé and Harbin beer signs surrounding a circuslike ring.
We pulled up to a table next to a foggy window and ordered a round of beers. Families with young children sat at tables around us, anxiously awaiting what was to follow.
The show began with a Chinese trainer leading a dozen or so mangy wolves around a ring, their gray hair a patchy mix of thick tufts and bald spots. The wolves jumped through hoops and did an assortment of other unimpressive tricks. One particularly haggard wolf was whipped by his master and took a frightened dump in the middle of the ring.
The wolves were followed by house cats that performed equally lame hoop jumps, followed by a boar that could identify Chinese characters in exchange for a
It was a white Christmas in Beijing, but not in the Bing Crosby sense. Outside the office windows, the sky was a toxic white haze of suffocating pollution. The hours passed by glacially. My colleagues and I took a long lunch and exchanged gifts. We tried to put on happy faces, but it didnât work.
For the first time, I was truly homesick.
E very year during the Chinese Lunar New Year, otherwise known as Spring Festival, occurs the largest human migration on earth. In the span of forty days, almost three billion passenger trips are made around the country. Train stations become desperate seas of humanity, where anxious travelers camp for days and weeks to purchase tickets that sell out in minutes. For many of Chinaâs 200 millionâplus migrant workers, the Lunar New Year is the one chance they have each year to return home, the one chance to see family and friends.
For me, escape from Beijing was imperative as well. During Spring Festival, the entire city goes on a massive fireworks binge at all hours of the day and night. For three consecutive days that February, I had been going about my routine amid constant explosions, waking up at dawn to deafening pop-pop-pop s, car alarms, and children squealing. For a day, the fireworks are pretty cool, an entire city of eighteen million alight with dangerous explosives that can be purchased on any street corner. After two days, itâs annoying. By day three or four, thoughts creep to murder.
I was anxious to begin exploring the country again. My life felt lazy and routine: work, DVDs, dinner/drinks, rinse, repeat. I wanted some excitement, and Harbin, a city in northeast China, seemed to offer it. A colleague had visited Harbin a few weeks earlier and stumbled upon a rare attraction: bears wrestling while wearing capes. The strange event occurred at the site of Harbinâs annual ice festival, which featured ice replicas of the Acropolis, the Egyptian pyramids, the Eiffel Tower, and other famous landmarks. My colleague spoke highly of the cityâs vodka-fueled nightlife, and taken together it seemed crazy enough to warrant a look.
I had a few days off and many of my friends, including Julia, were out of town. Through China Daily âs travel agency, Jeremy, Ben, and I managed to buy tickets to Harbin, capital of Heilongjiang province, nine hours to the north, near Siberia.
We took a morning train and arrived in late afternoon. The temperature was minus twenty degrees Celsius. We promptly took a taxi to an ice bar on the main street and downed shots of vodka under a pair of reindeer horns harnessed to the ice wall.
Fortified for the cold, we walked toward the yellowish glow of Harbinâs ice city, not far from downtown. Hundreds of families, bundled up in layers of winter clothing, snapped photos in front of ice sculptures and buildings lit up in red, yellow, green, and blue. I followed my colleagueâs instructions to the back of the ice city, where she had spotted the wrestling bears a few weeks earlier. We climbed to the top of the Acropolis and spotted the venue we sought: a rest area with Nescafé and Harbin beer signs surrounding a circuslike ring.
We pulled up to a table next to a foggy window and ordered a round of beers. Families with young children sat at tables around us, anxiously awaiting what was to follow.
The show began with a Chinese trainer leading a dozen or so mangy wolves around a ring, their gray hair a patchy mix of thick tufts and bald spots. The wolves jumped through hoops and did an assortment of other unimpressive tricks. One particularly haggard wolf was whipped by his master and took a frightened dump in the middle of the ring.
The wolves were followed by house cats that performed equally lame hoop jumps, followed by a boar that could identify Chinese characters in exchange for a
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