the beijing beat

A few evenings ago, an older colleague invited myself and a few others to her house for tea. She had gone on a trip to Yunnan, where the best tea in China is grown. 

She let us smell each tea, described the process that goes into making it, and then prepared the tea in a pot and explained the way to drink tea. The first cup is more about smelling the fragrant tea. The second cup is where you really taste the flavor, and by the third cup the tannin starts to come out, coating your mouth in the bitter flavor. 

It was a lovely few hours of tea drinking, leaving me feeling very civilized, but also refreshed.

Also, idiot confession, it was here that I discovered that all tea is the same plant! I used to think green tea, jasmine tea, earl grey, English breakfast, etc., all came from different varieties of tea plant. Not the case. All tea is made with the leaves of the  Camellia sinensis.

Teas get their different flavors from the way they are processed, prepared and fermented. Very interesting…

On the morning of Thanksgiving, I woke up to negative degrees and a smog-filled sky. While my family on two other continents were preparing feasts and enjoying a family-filled holiday, I was stuck in the office, bombarded by busy work and homesickness (an illness particularly present during the holiday season). 

Things improved when my lovely department took me out for a Thanksgiving lunch (albeit at a Korean restaurant) and the evening entailed a delicious turkey dinner with four Brits (full of questions) and a late showing of Life of Pi (great film).

We make our own traditions when isolated from the familiar ones. I missed my family, but was glad of friends willing to eat and drink a lot with me. And to be well away from the madness of Black Friday and family arguments. 

This post was brought to you by a homesick but still stuffed Callie. Can’t wait for Christmas!

TG and I saying grace before our meal. Thankful for the health & happiness of my friends and family. For good food, and cheap wine, and pumpkins. 

or, more accurately, it has snowed. There are little mini snowbanks on my window sills. Hello Winter, how nice of you to join us A MONTH EARLY. 

Heating was supposed to turn on across BJ at midnight but no such luck. This is gonna be funnnnn!

Halloween is something I’ve celebrated every year since I can remember. This meant pumpkin carving, trick or treating, costumes costumes costumes, candy, and later on, parties. Halloween in Beijing is not much like it is in Australia or the US. But it still exists. An article on Halloween even made it into today’s China Daily. 

Since this Halloween is on a Wednesday, many Beijingers celebrated over last weekend. My posse of costumed hooligans fell in on a Trick-or-Treat Scavenger Hunt Bar Crawl on Saturday night. 

My friend H and I dressed up as Sam and Suzy from Moonrise Kingdom, and in a great twist, my friend S was dressed as a cat, so ergo, Suzy’s cat. Perfecto. Other costumes included the typical: witch, vampire, etc.

Yes its true few recognised who I was meant to be, but those that did were my kind of people, so the costume worked as a sort of password-protected door to conversation. That sounds real stuck-up doesn’t it? Whatever, there were a lot of dudes dressed as computer game characters and chicks dressed as sexy bunnies so I had to have some sort of mechanism, right? What evs, you don’t get it, I’m moving on. (STOP JUDGING ME TUMBLR!)

The crawl was really fun and thrilling and oddly competitive given the amount of jello-shots in syringes they were handing out at various locations… You know what I mean.

We did not win, in fact, I don’t think we even turned in our evidence. But it was a fun mad ride and dressing up is the main point ANYWAY. Or so I told S when she was tres disappointed about our loss. 

Sunday I carved a pumpkin into a legit jack-o-lantern. This was fun, though a bit weird to do sans family. 

Last night the gang was coerced by the very bossy TG to watch The Woman in Black, which, despite the presence of Daniel Radcliffe, was quite terrifying. What made it that much more scary was that at two critical fear-points something fell off the table behind us. And I mean RIGHT AT THAT SCARY FRIGHT MOMENT.  Flipping weird. Now vaguely convinced the woman in black is now inhabiting my rumpus room. Yes it took me three hours to get to sleep after it. 

Today is for realsies Halloween and I brought in a bunch of candy corn (sent my my lovely Aunt in the US) into my office. My Chinese colleagues were not quite sure how to handle the insane sugar hit that comes in these orange-white-and-yellow bad boys, but they sucked it up and then spent the afternoon running around like mad little children on a sugar high. SO MUCH FUN.

So there we have, my Halloween in BJ = drinking, costumes, spooky movies, and candy. Covering all bases, because I am a professional.