My Chinese New Year Travels

            I've been off from school since last weekend and I've been trying to utilize this time to travel outside of Macau. So far, I've spent a few days both in Hong Kong and Beijing, and while there is much to talk about in terms of my adventures, I first want to talk about this time of year in China and the cultural experiences I've had over the past week.

This was near Senado Square,
all very festive!

            All of the schools in China have been off since last week and most if not all will stay off for at least another week. This is because of Chinese New Year, which happens on the 23rd day of the 12th month on the Chinese lunar calendar, was February 16th and the celebration can last several days. Most people go home and celebrate with their families and fireworks, festivals, parades, and big dinners are the minimal expectations during the holiday. If you need a comparison, this celebration is as big if not bigger than Christmas, especially to the Chinese people.

Ah so pretty!

Aaaand it's in flames.

All around me are banners with New Year greetings and trees raveled in lights and Chinese lanterns hung on street lamps. All of this gets me into the festive mood, and even makes me forget that I've never really celebrated this holiday before! I'm constantly blown away by the ways people celebrate as well. On the first night of CNY when walking in Beijing, Connor and I came across many people on street corners lighting small fires and throwing fruit into the flames. As I wrote this, Connor and I heard the sounds of traditional instruments being played outside, so we ran out of our Airbnb to see a group of people parading with large paper-mache horses and a carriage down the street. I followed them a little bit until they reached the end of the road when they threw down the horses and carriage in the middle of the crosswalk and lit them on fire while everyone knelt down. I couldn't get most of the details due to my low level of Mandarin, but apparently this was their tradition spanning many years. But I also don't think it was legal. It’s funny how little people outside the region of China know of such a huge holiday when literally of millions of people celebrate in such amazing ways.

With that, I’m going to backtrack to the beginning of my adventure last Sunday when I travelled to Hong Kong on my own for a few days. I think that this trip has been the most personally uplifting part of my entire experience here in China. The sheer fact that I planned this trip, travelled there, got around, and saw so many things relying solely on myself has really built up my confidence in what I now know what I’m capable of and could potentially be capable of in the future. Yeah, I know it’s corny, but this was a big thing for me. Based on the few days I’ve spent there, I would probably place Hong Kong very high on the list of cities I love the most.

Managed to get a panorama of Hong Kong

I did so much while I was there, but I’ll try to give a summary. I saw the
Hong Kong skyline light up to music at the Symphony of Lights, I saw a bunch of street performers and artists at the cultural center, I walked through huge and beautiful Hong Kong park, and I took a tram car up Victoria Peak and got a 360 degree view of the city. I also went on a cable car ride over mountains to see the Big Buddha statue and the Path of Wisdom, walked around the Ladies’ Market (one of the biggest flea markets in Hong Kong), and spent a bit of time looking around the flea market that opens up every night right outside my hostel. I took so many pictures to fill up an album! And I did! You can check them out right here. I really would like to make another trip there sometime! After all, you can hike for 2-3 hours to see the Big Buddha instead of the tram car, and while that would be as close as I could get to death based on the amount of stairs winding up and down the mountains, I think it would be another amazing experience.

The beginning of the Path of Wisdom

Speaking of the Big Buddha trip, it was a gratifying experience in more ways than one. Part of the attraction is the Path of Wisdom: an area with wooden planks where the Heart Sutra is carved onto wooden planks in the shape of infinity mostly apart from the load tourists. The area was definitely beautiful, but simply walking on part of the hiking trail to the Path of Wisdom was a wonderful experience. The masses of tourists in the main area of the village and the Big Buddha are so loud, but you couldn’t hear a word in the woods. For the most part, I didn’t see anyone on the trail, and I could only hear the sounds of my feet and the wind through the trees. It was a great walk. Another great experience that came from this trip was being able to see just how impressionable this place was to real Buddhists. I saw a few older people bowing and clasping their hands over and over again, and I got an idea of

Say hi to the Buddha!

just how big of a deal the presence of this statue was to them. Later on, I walked over towards a temple that was blocked off from all the tourists, and you can hear the monks begin their 4 pm chanting session, and just like the festive feeling I get from the Chinese New Year celebration, I too felt a bit religiously inclined in a place like this. Overall, I think that my last minute trip to Hong Kong was a great decision and very rewarding. So on my last day, I got up at 4am and boarded an airport bound (double decker!) bus and was ready to get on an 8am flight to Beijing.

At this point, Connor finally joined me and we had a smooth flight and eventually met up with our very generous Airbnb host who offered to pick us up at the airport. The first day was largely spent resting in our room due to lack of sleep, and the second day was also pretty chill as I met up with my good friend from high school and her friend who are coincidently also studying abroad in Beijing this semester. But these past couple days have been spent trying to really make the most out of being in the capital of China during CNY and that means going to festivals. I think a good description of these kinds of festivals really boils down to the equivalent of going to Time Square to see the ball drop on New Years’ Eve: it’s really crowded and claustrophobic, transportation is an absolute nightmare, and it’s incredibly cold!

Just festival things 😉

I would guess that there are thousands of people who go to just one of the many festivals in Beijing per day for New Year celebrations. It’s honestly pretty hard to walk around the carnival games, see the shows, or buy the food without walking into someone multiple times. This goes for outside the festivals as well. Huge masses of people go across the crosswalks and sidewalks to get to the parks and temples where they’re held with help from roadblocks and extensive security detail. Due to certain safety precautions, multiple bus and subway stops nearby the festival areas are skipped over (with very little indication), forcing a lot of people (us) to find another way in. Eventually we are able to get there, but the whole guessing game for figuring out transportation when we don’t have SIM cards yet has not been very fun. Of course, it’s very cold here compared to the weather of Macau I’ve been enjoying this past month. I plunged back into the freezing temperatures, but I came prepared with all my winter gear!

I haven’t done much sightseeing in Beijing yet, but we are making plans for Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City, the Great Wall, and the Ming Tombs. Again, I have a lot of pictures of things I have barely even talked about here, so I would highly suggest checking out my Gallery page for all the pictures I've taken so far. It should be an interesting week, and I should be back in Macau by the time my next blog post is up, so look forward to finding out how the rest of my travels turn out!

再见!

TL;DR: Going to Hong Kong on my own was a great decision, did a lot of cool things there, had to get up SUPER early for my flight to Beijing, meet up with an old friend, Chinese New Year celebrations are amazing, they are also extremely difficult to travel around, brrr it's cold!