February 7th 2011

Hi everybody.

First of all: I wish you a happy, successful new year! Not to worry, I did not fall on my head and loose my memory, nor am I going to write the same Newsletter like four weeks ago. Right now we are celebrating the Chinese New Year or Spring Festival according to the moon calendar. Apparently we are going from the year of the tiger to the year of the bunny. Sorry, I mean rabbit. The spring festival is the most important festivity in China, comparable to a combined Christmas and New Years in western culture. The celebrations start with the Chinese New Year and end 15 days later with the Lantern Festival. During this time (and a few days before) there is 24/7 fireworks and firecracker. I am not kidding! Today I woke up early around 6:30 from a loud bang; right now it is 6 p.m. and I can watch several fireworks in the city. You can buy fireworks at every corner and the streets are already littered with the remains of used crackers.

I got invited from my boss/friend Yongfeng Men to celebrate Spring Festival eve with him, his wife and their little daughter. He is an excellent chef which made me ask him how serious he is about being a Professor. Around 11 p.m. we made dumplings ourselves and had them (as it is a tradition in northern China) at midnight. During the whole evening there was CCTV’s New Years Gala on the TV, even though most of the time no one was watching. This seems to be another, albeit very new tradition. According to my sources there are about 700 million people watching that show (take that, Dieter Bohlen)! The gala mainly consists of music, dance, artistic acts and comedy. Being in this show can make your livelihood and ticket prices to your act will sky rocket! Most of the sketches I did not understand but I am pretty sure there was one about an apple. Yongfeng asked me to teach them the rules of UNO. They brought a set back from Germany but lost the rule sheet. Not having played it for a few years myself resulted in me inventing at least three new rules. Now, as a child I did this on purpose to help my game. But this time my Chinese hosts adapted much faster to those rules than I!

Although the official spring holidays started two days before New Year’s Eve my colleagues started to vanish already about 10 days before. Each day someone else was missing. One can easily understand that: everybody is going home to his family and getting a ticket is hard. According to official estimates there will be about 2 billion transportations happening during this period, mostly by train. I was told that people stood in front of the railway station for several hours while it was -20 °C to get their ticket. One colleague had to travel by train for 5 days to get to her family, which is living about 3000 km from here. Right now a lot of shops are closed and there seems to be less traffic in the streets. Unfortunately, I have one bag of laundry in the laundry shop and I have no idea when they will open again. At least now I know what the owner tried to tell me when I gave
her the bag. 😉

Two weeks ago I visited Harbin which is about 250 km north of Changchun. There you can already see some Russian influence on the style of the buildings. My travel guide had several safety tips for Harbin which amused my Chinese colleague accompanying me: „Harbin is less developed than Beijing or Shanghai and public law and order is much the same. People from Dongbei (province) are known to be extremely heavy drinkers and are easily provoked into violent fights if annoyed. While this may not directly involve you, if you are as a foreigner at the scene you could quickly find yourself becoming the next victim. Most trouble that people run into in Harbin revolves around drinking at the clubs in town. Harbin bars can be rough and there are many barfights on the weekends so be vigilant and don’t let your guard down. As a general rule of thumb, don’t go around stealing the girlfriend of a huge Russian guy or a Chinese mob boss. And don’t go out alone! Fights are common in bars, and there have been reports of stabbings at night clubs. Don’t expect the police to come to the rescue or even the bar security. Dress plenty warm during the winter months in order to avoid frostbite. …“. Now to me this description seems a little over the top and I did not experience any problems with Russians or Chinese mob. However, the taxi drivers in Harbin are worse rascals than here in Changchun. We always had to settle for a price about twice than what one would have to pay when using the distance counter and at one time we got cheated when the driver did not return the correct change. Also, I suspect the hotel employees to have stolen my credit card information. They took the card in the back room for a
minute (I already had a bad feeling about that back then) and a few days later my credit card company had to invalidate the card due to attempted abuse! Luckily, they detected the problem in time and I don’t have any major problems there. But be advised to be careful when you go to Harbin! So, what was my motivation to go there? Due to the low temperatures in winter and the lengthy period below 0 °C they build a lot of ice and snow sculptures in the city and even have an ice sculpture exhibition. The entry to that exhibition is about 40 € which is an extreme high amount for Chinese people. But the sculptures and ice castles are really impressive.