Chinese New Year!

Feb. 6-9- Taiyuan and Pingyao

Yesterday we returned from our trip to the north. Everyone complained about how cold it was. Everyone, that is, except for those of us who had braved the wild winter weather of Harbin.

Our first stop was the city of Taiyuan, about eight hours north of Beijing and two hours away from Pingyao, which was our true destination. We stopped in the city because Dr. Li wanted us to be in a big city for Chinese New Year. Most of us didn't understand, at first...

But then we heard the fireworks. It was the middle of the day, and they were already going full force. In fact, they went on through the night and sporadically for the next three days. It's best to watch the video, because it defies description, other than saying that a Chinese New Year celebration makes the Fourth of July look like a three year old holding a sparkler. If you hear anything that seems like rain in the audio- it's just millions of firecrackers that act as a sort of garnish to the explosive feast.

The next day we went on to Pingyao. The town of Pingyao is an ancient walled-in city, much like most European ancient walled-in cities. They had the requisite big-spikey-thing that they could drop on invaders...

It's in shadow, but there are lots of spikes...

And, like most ancient walled-in cities, even the hotels are part of the ancient gloriousness...

Amanda in the hotel courtyard

And we spent a good deal of time in the marketplace, looking at old things to buy. It was a curious thing that most of the ancient artifacts in any given antique store looked exactly like the ancient artifacts in any adjacent antique store.

The program bought us all tickets to go into any museum in Pingyao, and so we tried to visit as many of them as possible. They were all what used to be large homes with courtyards turned into exhibits about the growth of Pingyao's martial arts or the first banks in China. The more I see of Chinese museums, the more I think of the wonderful museums that we enjoy in the United States, which avoid making every display look like a scene out of Mr. Roger's Neighborhood. We had fun seeing what we could of the actual historical objects, though.

There was a room full of these little statues in a Daoist Temple,
and this one was apparently mine.

John Wayne (we call him "The Duke") and I manage to look
dumb in front of lots of Chinese people. No one told us that
they were behind us until it was too late. I don't really know
what that pose is all about...

This is just a great picture of John and Amanda

As always, all of the photos I took on our trips (not too many, don't get excited) are at http://www.flickr.com/photos/23482798@N04/

Hopefully I'll get back into the swing of doing a post every other day now that our Spring Break is over. Tomorrow is our first day of Tai Chi, and I'm pretty excited about that (even though it is at 7AM).