Looking down Caobo main street.
More snow fell at Spring Festival, but we still went around everyone’s houses to wish them a happy new year and collect:
…free cigarettes and lucky money.
After a day of walking around, smiling, eating sweets, we felt a bit:
At new year, there seems to be a reason for fireworks at any time of day or night, or rather, no one needs any special excuse.
Everyone thought it was funny that I kept making “wooh! oooh!” noises for the fireworks.
Fireworks safety?
On the news they had a serious report about a “disaster” fire in a fireworks factory. Hilarious scenes of multicoloured explosions and multidirectional rockets reminiscent of the scene in Les Vacances De Mr Hulot.
Making Spring Festival dumplings using a beer bottle as a rolling pin.
We had a hairdryer but no electricity.
Baba always seemed to be doing things outside, possibly related to feeding or killing animals, but also possibly related to popping over to neighbours’ houses to help with their wine.
George being highly sociable. (Portable DVD watching management training seminar video.)
Granny keeping warm. We sat around the charcoal burner most of the day.
We sat around by candle light when there was no power in the evenings.
Everyone played cards every evening for money. (Also quite often by candle light.) Chinese card games can only be described as mysterious. One wonders if the actual participants know what is going on. There are at least 10 locations for piling the cards, sometimes face up, and four pools of money with the cash shifting in all directions apparently randomly, and the “turns” often jump around or just stop in mid flow and everything gets restarted. Thankfully with a stake of 1 jiao it takes Jenny about five hours to lose 20 RMB.
The day before our wedding party, we had to go for supper at Eldest Uncle’s house. Great except that we finished lunch at 2pm and they called us for dinner at 3.30 because they wanted to get it done before it got dark.
It was in fact already completely dark inside the old house. We lit candles. Half an hour after we left, the generator was switched on and we had electric light.
Thanks to the flash, we can appreciate the Chairman Mao wallpaper.
Granny is amazingly tolerant of young people’s photo habit.
Another uncle and cousin arrived from Changsha before the party:
At Chinese new year every table has to have bowls of largely inedible snack food:
We tried a special dry rice sweet this time, which dries up your mouth and makes you laugh causing you to spurt flour everywhere.
Tree, frozen.
Me, frozen.
They are laughing at me, not with me, because it turns out that is a bucket full of frozen poo from the cesspit due for putting on the vegetables.
Now we know how the vegetables grow so succulent.
Baba bought and raised a pig specially for us to eat at the wedding party:
When it was slaughtered we woke up to the screams at dawn. The pig produced three buckets of intestines, which we ate apparently in preference to the actual meat. We had one meal entirely of blood and liver dishes; that was when I had a relapse of my pre-departure cold, and everyone thought I was in a bad mood and kept trying to make me eat more.
We also ate these:
The old house is only used for storage now.
Fortunately the old lavatory is not used for anything now.
Village transportation.
Standing smoking by the front door, staring at passers-by. An important Caobo pastime.
Village waste recycling.
I decided the weight of three inches of snow on the flat roof upstairs was probably not a good thing structurally, so set the task of removing the snow. Unfortunately only the top inch was actually snow, and the other two inches underneath were solid ice.
An hour of chiselling with the shovel like this left us quite warm, but only about one square metre into removing the ice. Jenny got a blister on her thumb and my gloves got wet from the ice and dyed my hands black for two days.
After chiselling with the shovels didn’t work, we tried pouring hot water on the ice. It worked, but only if you poured the whole bucket of boiling water in one place, producing a small hole in the ice. Since boiling the water took half an hour per bucket, this was abandoned in favour of a mallet and chisel. Baba came upstairs to tell me not to do this, as it would damage the roof. However, after trying with the shovel he came round to our point of view:
Ridiculous attempt to “do” anything while in Caobo.
The days in Caobo ran as follows:
- wake up all warm and cozy
- go back to sleep, no reason to get out of bed
- woken at lunch time by a succession of relatives hammering on the bedroom door shouting “chi fan le!” (’food’s up!’)
- eat lunch and drink large amounts of sweet rice spirits
- fall asleep on a sofa
- wake up because of creeping frostbite in extremities
- thaw out body sitting at charcoal burner
- stare into space
- get woken from intermediate hypothermic stupor by relatives shouting “chi fan le!” again, this time for supper at about 5pm
- eat same food as lunch time, remixed with additional animal parts, and much more wine
- smoke 100th cigarette by front door
- walk in small circles going “hmyurss”
- psych oneself up for having a shower by standing in the bathroom breathing out steam and mentally planning how to get undressed and dressed in the quickest possible way
- chicken out of having a shower and walk up and down listlessly some more
- go to bed as soon as the generator power has powered the electric blanket long enough to melt the film of ice on the duvet
George and Baba. Example of what happens to your smile when you have intermediate hypothermia.
I love the diesel generator: now I can watch the TV news which tells me normal electricity is back in all locations thanks to Wen Jia Bao and the crisis is over! Also seen on TV: a commercial for a Chinese-made copy of Transformers toys, with a man in a sad lycra outfit pretending to be a robot, prancing around in fake explosions. The most annoying thing I kept seeing on TV was a trio of fat little boys dressed up as grown ups, e.g. as Beijing opera singers, or stand up comics in suits, who had been trained to do various annoying ‘cute’ acts with those uniquely Chinese exaggerated facial expressions and meaningless flourishy hand movements.
The large pink sofa was bought by us on the far side of Shenzhen, delivered to Huanggang Village, packed into a removal truck by Liji and three guys in the middle of the night, and transferred to another truck in Youxian for delivery to Caobo. Was it worth it?
Definitely!
After the nightmare train journey, a week of waiting in Zhuzhou watching travel reports, and the somewhat perilous two step car journey, actually arriving in Caobo was a major achievement.
In typical Chinese country style, there was no chance to enjoy that moment of getting out of the car. We had to get the bags out and get ourselves in the front door before the firecrackers finished exploding around us!
The most important achievement of all was that we were walking through the door of Mama and Baba’s NEW HOUSE!
They had moved into the new house in a ceremony the day before - it had to be on that lucky day appointed by the soothsayer.
Life in the village, when your daughter and son-in-law arrive after not seeing them for 18 months, revolves around especially large meals. Everyone kept giving me the biggest bits of meat and complaining that I wasn’t eating enough.
George with duck drumstick and chicken drumstick.
A meal materializes:
The larder / fridge.
Kitchen preparations at an early stage before steam reduces visibility to 5cm.
“Yay, dinner! Already three hours since lunch? That’s why I’m so hungry.”
“Yes, just a little more wine will warm you up.”
“More hot wine everyone!”
“Specially all non-spicy dishes to suit George.”
“So… Spicy!”
Countryside dishes are presented in bowls often full of soup or oil.
Chili carp.
These prawns traveled the same distance as us, hopefully in a shorter time.
Goat nuggets. Or just duck, Jenny claims.
Whole chicken soup.
Another of Jenny’s Uncles, from Xiangtan, came all the way over for just one day to see us. He couldn’t come to the wedding party because his daughter was having a baby, and in fact at the time of writing she has just produced a baby boy.
As soon as we heard the roads were better thanks to the two days of sunlight melting some of the ice, we made a run for the bus station to try to get to Caobo, Jenny’s hometown, before the north wind froze everything again. I thought it would be just me and Jenny, but Auntie and Uncle Liu and their son Liu Pei all decided to come the same time too… AND Granny.
We took a taxi to the bus station, but it turned out to be the wrong bus station. It didn’t matter because we were stopped by a taxi driver who offered to take us halfway to Caobo - to the crossroads town of Wanglin - for a reasonably non-ridiculous amount of money. We stood looking at the car - a Jetta - with our bags and decided half of us could make it and the others either bargain another taxi or go to the bus. After George, Jenny, Granny, and Auntie were in the car with all the bags inside too, that seemed like a waste for Uncle and Liu Pei to go separately, so they got in too and somehow the back door was closed on five people. As we car drove away a lot of twisting and grunting put Jenny on Liu Pei’s lap and Auntie somehow half on Uncle’s lap. It didn’t matter for Chinese people though because the drive only took three and a half hours in that position. The main person to suffer was Granny, who got carsick and threw up out of the window all the way, and when it got too cold to lean out of the window, in a series of plastic bags inside the car.
Altogether it was a jolly ride despite observing a succession of more than twenty car accidents on the snowy roads ranging from comical (a line of cars crashed together and somehow facing forwards, backwards, forwards) to impressive (upside down coaches) to chilling (taxi floating amongst icebergs in a village pond with a body being fished out by a fascinated crowd).
At the transport hub of Wanglin we found another local guy with a car who knew a back way to Caobo without taking the mountain road. We hired him and his relatively spacious - but unheated - minibus. After another three hours on roads where I kept saying “I thought we weren’t taking the mountain road” the familiar sights of the White Dragon Cave, Heaven-Person Bridge, and Seven-Mile Town showed that we were almost there at last!
We bought some sesame cake but the bakery had obviously run out of sesame and used black pepper instead. Yurm.
A walk in Zhuzhou’s public park:
We discovered a “western” restaurant in Zhuzhou, with questionable interpretations of cappucino but who cares, it was the only place in the city with central heating!
On the last day in Zhuzhou a little sunlight led to thawing snow slipping off the roofs of buildings. You could hear enormous crashes all around, and after getting back from the above walk, a car parked by Uncle’s apartment had had its whole roof crushed by falling snow. It was flattened like a trodden-on toy car. As we admired that, we looked up to see another block of snow just shifting its way off the edge of a roof on the other side of the courtyard. We all shouted to a man walking underneath, who, in what must have been under one second but somehow played out in slow motion, looked at us quizically, looked up, made a comical “noooooo” expression, and dived for cover, escaping the avalanche by inches.
Chinese snowmen revealed a streak of creativity in their makers.
(Police van going down a side road deciding whether to run down Jenny and a snow monkey king.)
Other snowmen seen out of car / bus window: snow buddha, snow guanyin (goddess of mercy), snow pig, snow lion passant, snow muscle man, snow cubist sculpture.
We decided to go for a walk and visit Zhuzhou’s only tourist attraction, the not very ancient Zhuzhouffel Tower and a big statue of the first king of all China, Yan Di. Just like a normal communist leader statue but more concrete beard.
Liu Pei enjoyed dismembering several snowmen:
We know how to have fun in the snow:
But Chinese people generally need to get in a group and have someone tell them how to have fun:
