Das Wandern ist des Müllers Lust

Happy new year! While you were holding on for a while during that magic week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, where time seems to come to a standstill, life in China is just going its way (I took my very own holiday from blogging though). Which is not to say that people here completely ignore our holidays, they just deal with them in their own manner. That often means taking out the cultural part and focus on the looks and the commercial aspect. It might sound condescending, but I don’t mean it that way at all. I adore the ease with which Chinese adopt aspects of other cultures they like, without second thoughts about their deeper purpose or traditional significance. Christmas lights always look nice and you don’t have to believe in Jesus (it’s not like we’re all doing it) to use Christmas as an excuse to have some nice activities at work or gather up with friends. And of course, Chinese have their own kind of Christmas and New Year in one festival, called Chinese New Year or Spring Festival. While the occasion to celebrate it might be different, the manner in which it is held is very similar. Families all over the country reunite, eat sumptuous meals and presents are given to the kids (usually in the form of red envelopes containing money). Public life also comes to a standstill for the one week of national holidays and the big cities, where many residents are not native, but only for work, become ghost-towns. I spent CNY in Taipei two years ago and it felt very weird to drive on 8-lane highways that are usually bustling of cars and now were empty save for the occasional taxi. However, while the city centers might be empty, motorways across the country are overflooding with cars, trains are booked out the very minute tickets go on sale and airlines are drowning in profits, with flight prices easily tripling. I mean, imagine ten times Germany’s population needing to go somewhere and back across a huge country, all at the same time. In other words, it’s a very bad time to travel, which is exactly what I’m gonna do.

While classes continue throughout December, Chinese universities schedule their final exams for the beginning of January. Those are followed by a 6-week semester break which encompasses CNY. That means I’m just done with my exams and looking forward to extended holidays (really the only long holidays I have during this program). As of today, I got all my grades, will receive my – in reality meaningless – 1^st semester diploma tomorrow and stay in Beijing until this Sunday. Then I’m going to Shanghai for a trip organized by the DAAD, visiting mostly German companies from Monday to Friday and certainly wearing my shiny suit every now and then.

The real vacation starts after that, with a flight from Shanghai to my beloved Taipei next week Friday, where I’ll be spending a week. I wanna say I’m going to see lots of old friends from my exchange semester two years ago, but the thing with talented young Taiwanese people is, they’re leaving their country, if not after high school to get tertiary education elsewhere, then after obtaining their bachelor’s degree. My anecdotal evidence: Out of the 5 Taiwanese people that I’m still more or less in touch with, 5 left Taiwan. The people I still know there are a younger undergrad student who hasn’t finished her bachelor yet and a friend from Berlin, who’s been in Taiwan before like me and who’s now doing a one-year language program there. It’s kind of sad to see how such an amazingly livable and friendly place fails not only to attract talent but even to retain the smart people that are native to it. Part of the blame certainly goes to China, who actively lures Taiwanese to the mainland to hurt the island’s government and establish stronger ties between the people of both countries, but there’s a bunch of homegrown economic problems, the most important being that salaries are just crappy in international comparison.

The good thing about your friends moving is, you can visit them at other places, such as Tokyo, where I’m gonna go after Taipei. I really haven’t been that excited to see a new place in quite a while. I’ve never been a fan of anime or Japanese pop culture in a broader sense, but the peculiarity of the country keeps fascinating me. From stories of how the victims of the nuclear bombs in WW2 died in silence, because weeping in public, even with horrible burns, would be shameful, to the lewdness in which young girls are portrayed, I’m very much puzzled by Japan. I’m not even hoping to understand all this after a week, just curious to see it from close-up.

After a week in Tokyo, my next flight is taking me to Hongkong (I know this all sounds super posh, but given low-cost airlines and the fact that I’m staying with friends all the time, it’s not even that expensive), where I’ll spend just two short days before taking the newly opened high-speed train to mainland China, Guangzhou more specifically. That’s exactly on the first day of CNY and I’m very happy for already having obtained my train ticket. The reason I’m going to Guangzhou is that one co-scholar of mine here in Beijing is German/Cantonese and has parts of her family living there. In case you’re wondering why someone with Cantonese parents would go to China to learn Chinese, Cantonese is a regional language of its own, based on the same script, but with entirely different pronunciations of the characters. So my Mandarin won’t help me understand any of the table conversations during CNY, but I think it’ll be an amazing experience nonetheless.

I haven’t even decided myself how I’m gonna spend the last few days of my holiday and get back to Beijing from Guangzhou, but I’ll figure that out too. As you can see, this blog is once more about to turn into a travel blog (temporarily) and yeah, I missed it.