Books, Couchsurfing dinners, and hotsprings

I am officially off of work for Spring Festival. Also called 春节 (chūn ​jié​), or Chinese new year, it involves lots of people traveling. I want to save money for debt payment and for future travels (especially Spain this summer!), and it is still a bit chilly outside for my preferences, so I am gonna be staying at home for most of this vacation. Fortunately, I have some things I want to take care of at home. Primarily, I am zooming through China Shakes the World as fast as I can because I am very eager to start Kwame Anthony Appiah's Cosmopolitanism. I also have a book on Latin America that I am very excited to read. Unless something unexpected comes up, China Shakes the World should be the last China book I read for a while. I am still interested in plenty of China-issues, and there are still loads of books in the China section of my "books to read" list, but I am trying to focus on Latin America. I have ordered Forgotten Continent: The Battle for Latin America's Soul and Open Veins of Latin America off of Taobao, so those are my planned readings after Spring Festival.


Reading isn't the only thing that I will be doing though! In addition to the 40 Gigs of movies that I have gathered over the past year that could use watching, I plan on practicing some juggling everyday, and hopefully some P90-X driven exercise. I also am going to make regular use of some instructional breakdancing videos I got from a Russian guy at the juggling club. Hopefully I can get some basic toprock down by the time my vacation is over.


Much like many Americans spend Christmas at home with extended family, most Chinese people go back to their hometowns for Spring Festival. This means that the majority of my Chinese friends are out of town for the week (some for the month!), and Beijing suddenly becomes a much quieter and calmer city (except for the fireworks). Most of us foreigners don't have an ancestral hometown in China, though, and some Chinese people don't go home, so I will be going to a big couchsurfer gathering on Wednesday night to celebrate the new year with our international community here in Beijing. Comprising, dinner, watching the fireworks, and dancing, I think an event like this will be good for me. Regardless as to how much I normally yearn for more downtime to read and watch movies, I know that having nothing at all on my schedule is the opposite end of the spectrum, and is no better for my mental health than being overly busy is. Having some social things like this planned will keep me from going crazy and getting bored with my schedule of reading and other self-focused activities.

I am also going to to and check out some nearby hot springs with a Chinese friend whose hometown actually around Beijing, in a nearby area called Yanjiao (燕郊), so that will be another fun time out being social. Not to mention the idea of relaxing at a hot springs for a whole day is very appealing in itself.

A Regular Sunday

On some Sundays I help Federico manage a group of performers in The Village in Sanlitun on the east side of Beijing. On these Sundays I will usually meet at the local juggling/fixed gear bike shop Natooke around 1, and be at The Village between 2 and 3, after which we have our performances. As an example, here is my day on Sunday October 17^th.

I woke up naturally at around seven thirty, and I promptly spent about an hour and a half putting various songs into a playlist to use for the performance in the afternoon. After finishing the playlist, I took a shower, did email and facebook things. A big thing was that I was able to linking up my blog to my facebook and I was also able to link up my twitter to my facebook. Facebook is the main way I communicate with friends from college, and although the twitter may be less important I am going to start writing blog posts more often. This is going to be one of those “keep family and friends updated as to my life” kind of blogs, much like many students write when they are on study abroad. Now every time I update my Twitter or write a new blog post, it will automatically be posted to my facebook. After selecting my outfit for the show in the afternoon, I left home at around 11am. I wanted to wait longer to wait for my couchsurfer, Ana, to wake up, but I was afraid that I was going to be late. It turns out that this was far earlier than I needed to leave home, but it turned out fine. When I got to Natooke Ines (one of the owners), Julien (her boyfriend) and friends were having lunch, so I joined them. In exchange for cleaning up the containers and the table afterward I was able to have their leftovers, which were both numerous and delicious. I had plenty of time, so I did some computer stuff and then started preparing the sanlunche (三轮车, literally three wheeled cart) for our show. Gus soon arrived and helped me get things ready, and soon the sanlunche’s sound system was all set up and we were ready to go. Federico hooked up a speaker, some lights, and put a really cool paint job on the sanlunche. Fede also has a big battery that we place in the sanlunche that powers a motor as well as the sound system, so I don’t even have to power it via my own legs with the pedals; I can just rotate the handle on the right side and the motor kicks in to send me zooming along the streets of Beijing. Arriving at The Village, Gus and I headed into the Orange and starting getting ready. Soon Jiuji arrived and after some playful banter and thumb-twiddling we headed out for the parade. We normally have a parade as the first part of our show. During the parade I will ride the Sanlunche around The Village with the music on, and I will shout out “There will be a big performance in the central square of The Village at 3:30! Big show at 3:30! All are welcome to come and enjoy this free performance!”, or something similar. Gus has really good Chinese (I think Gus’s Chinese is even better than mine, and I don’t meet many people under 30 with better Chinese than me) so he was the translator for today. We stopped every now and then for small preview performances from Gus or Jiuji, and a few times I even grabbed three balls and joined in. After thirty minutes of parade we had our big show.  I first introduced Jiu Ji, and he did a contact juggling routine. Jiu Ji’s performance was excellent (as always) and received lots of dropped jaws and wows (as always). Next up was Gus with a sharp juggling routine. I think he claims that it is nothing special, but in my opinion it is a pretty solid routine. As long as he is not being compared to any of the greats (up against which almost all jugglers would look horrible) I think he has some good tricks and he does them well. Next Jiu Ji went up again with a little light trick that he has been working on recently. This act is essentially passing a little ball of light between his hands, eating it, spitting it out, and so on and so forth. The audience loves it, and Jiu Ji’s motions are quick enough and smooth enough that most people cannot see how he does it. Just as Jiu Ji was finishing his light show, Ines rolled in (she came late due to an audition for a TV show that ran late) on her trick bike. I stalled for a bit of time by drawing out her introduction to give her time to strip out of her biking-across-town clothes and into her give-an-awesome-performance clothes, after which she hopped on and started doing her thing. All in all I think it was a good show. I prefer to have one additional performer, or some good audience interaction, but for having three performers I think that it was pretty good. After a few minutes of young Chinese girls telling Gus how cool he was (not only is he white, he also can speak Chinese and juggle!), we packed everything up on the sanlunche and headed back to Natooke. Gus came back to the shop with me to help me unload, after which we rode our bikes partway home together. By  the time I get home on Sunday evenings after managing Fede’s shows I am always exhausted, but it also one of the best times I have available to me to Skype chat with friends outside of China. No one was on/around at that time though, so I studied some language, read some news articles, and got some rest.