Tomorrow I head back to Dongbei for my annual pilgrimage "Beyond the Wall."
Of course, I'm not talking about the fictitious ice wall in the Game of Thrones.
I'm talking about going north of the biggest, baddest manmade wall in all of history:
The Great Wall.
Here is a picture of the eastern end of the Great Wall, which is clearly what HBO was modeling the above picture on.
Were it not for the typically searing pollution this time of year, northeast China is kinda great. At least for a week or two. Sure, I'll miss the hustle and bustle of Shanghai. But shooting fireworks, drinking baijiu, and gorging on dumplings is not that bad, either.
Plus, it's like a week-plus of speaking straight Chinese 24/7, so you know my second language is gonna be baller when I get back to the grind. That’s always a plus.
Still, sometimes I just gotta sneak in some TV time or traipse off to the town's only (and newly built since 2016) McDonald's. I swear I have no idea how I got any work done up in Dongbei before they built that blessed Mickey D's!
It's the coffee.
My Chinese family thinks I'm insane. They say, “Here is some Nescafe. Just add hot water!” 😰
“这是很好喝！又甜又热。你不需要别的。我们也有冰咖啡。你可以在超市随便买啊。”
But true coffeeheads know what I’m talking about. If I go a few days without coffee, my head starts to throb and I start to get the jitters. Not only that, but I’m sure I’m not the nicest person to hang out with. And that’s what the Spring Festival is all about.
Hanging with the fam.
Every single waking hour of the whole week-plus.
So, yes, I may sneak off to McDonald's to get some precious uninterrupted hours in to finish some work (After all, most of the people I work for don't care that it is Chinese New Year!), but really I just need to find some peace and quiet where I can pound back a couple free refills of the liquid gold before walking back the kilometer-plus to the family abode in sub-zero temperatures.
It goes on like that for 6-7 days. Every day a new relative's house to visit. Every day some sort of delicious pig soup and plates and plates of jiaozi. And then I start to get anxious about making it back to the big city. You see there's no way to buy a train ticket for the day you want to leave. They are all sold out. You just have to sit there and wait (or rather my wife begs my sister-in-law to work some kind of Chinese internet magic) and wait and wait... and wait until somebody returns their train ticket online. And then and only then, my sister-in-law performs some kind of magic Millennial internet voodoo and... voila! All of a sudden I am headed back home the next day. The wife and kid trailing a couple days behind.
Then we'll work and work and lose ourselves in the everyday toil of life for a few months...
And then we'll do it all over again next year.
Happy Year of the Pig 🐷everybody! 大家恭喜发财！ 🙏