Red Hair

Last Sunday I dyed my hair red. It’s pretty damn red. The change has proved more controversial than I'd anticipated. I have been surprised and amused by people’s reactions. Apparently in Suzhou it is de rigueur to tell people that you think their hair looks crap. Here are a select few comments:

“So. Did you mean your hair to turn out like that?”

(to me) “Oh. That’s… well… that’s certainly a change. Do you like it? Do you really like it?” (to Alan) “What do you think of that?”

“What possessed you to do that to yourself?”

“Oh. It’s you. I’ve been looking all over for you. I didn’t recognise you with your hair like that I thought you were some sort of wayward teenager.”

“It must be pretty tough when you’ve got hair like that to pick out clothes that match.”

“Chinese people think red is a lucky colour but they’d never have their hair like that.”

(at a Halloween party) “Where did you get your wig?”

The Million Trees Project

Roots and Shoots Shanghai aim to plant one million trees in Inner Mongolia to help offset China’s carbon emissions and reduce the effects of desertification.

My Eco Club group at school aim to raise enough money in our school to plant 1,000 trees. Trees are 25RMB (about 2 pounds, 50 pence.) By selling bamboo tree ornaments and wrist bands on Monday this week we raised enough money to plant 264 trees: only 736 to go!

You can offset your carbon emissions by planting trees. Go to: http://www.jgi-shanghai.org/Content.aspx?ItemID=164

The Hunt for the Pink T-shirt

It’s not very often that you need to find a pink t-shirt at short notice. We were positive. A quick 15 minute jaunt along Shiquan Jie should do it, then dinner. Then relax.

We left work at 5 o’clock. We sat on the bus for about half an hour and it didn’t move anywhere. I have now nicknamed myself the ‘five o’clock bus fascist’. My feeling being that if you’re not on the bus at 5 o’clock then you’re missing the bus, the bus is leaving without you. The 5 o’clock bus leaves at 5 o’clock. Not so.

At around 5.30 the bus driver shouts at us to get off the bus. Well he shouts a lot of things in Chinese that we don’t understand and gesticulates towards the door. He drives off leaving us in the same place we started. It transpires that he has gone to help out another bus that has crashed. Obviously.

So. We get on another bus. A bus that spends half an hour driving us in the wrong direction round the lake and then dumps us and tells us to get on another bus. Deciding our luck with buses is not particularly good we sack it off and opt for a taxi. The taxi driver does not seem pleased about our destination. He calls someone and puts them on the phone to us. The person on the phone asks where we are going. We tell him. This happens another three times before the taxi driver dumps us at the opposite end of the (very long) street from where we want to be.

We begin the very long walk, laden with bags from work. At first there is an absence of pink t-shirts. Shops have EVERY other colour of t-shirt other than pink. Then we spy some pink t-shirts. Ones with feathers, diamantes, giant pictures. No plain pink t-shirts. Where is Primark when you need it? We split up and arrange to meet in half an hour, pink t-shirts in hand. Neither of us can find the place we arranged to meet and spend 45 minutes looking for each other. I accidently knock a man off his bike and cause a ruckus. We trek UP the road, DOWN the road and eventually get a bloody pink t-shirt around 9.30. Only 4 and a half hours later.

We have dinner and get eaten alive by mosquitoes. Pink skin to match the pink t-shirt.

BUT: we did raise nearly 600 quid for breast cancer charities. 

China Wedding

So. We were in Beijing for the national holdiay and we got asked to go to a wedding. Well, less asked and more told we were going to a wedding. It didn’t seem to be an issue that we didn’t really know the bride or the groom or that we didn’t have an invitation.

Weddings begin at 11.05 I am told. It is an auspicious time. Many things in China are about luck. We went for dinner at a friend’s house and she gave us some apple pears she had picked to take home with us. She had to give us five, because four is very unlucky. Four, “si”, in Mandarin, sounds incredibly similar to the word for death: “si” but it’s said in a slightly different tone. The wedding was held on the eighth day of the month. Eight is a VERY lucky number. The Beijing Olympics began at eight minutes past eight on the eighth of August 2008. Eight, “ba”, is lucky because it sounds similar to the word “prosper”. But more importantly for a wedding, the number eight when written as a figure looks remarkably like the character for “double happiness”: 8 - 囍. Weddings have double happiness characters etched everywhere. On chocolates; projected on the wall and even the confetti explodes into tiny, red (a lucky colour) double happiness characters as it floats from the sky.

We turned up to the wedding not really knowing what to expect and it certainly delivered the unexpected. A giant Rolls Royce decked out in pink tulle rocked up and people crowded around it with giant tubes over their shoulders. The tubes were not too dissimilar to a rocket launcher. This is the China version of confetti. I would call it extreme confetti. It explodes with a similar sound to a rocket launcher and blasts millions of pieces of confetti into the sky. If you’re not careful it could blast one of your body parts into the sky with it.

As the wedding party crowded on the stairs to have their picture taken I stepped around to where the photographers were to take a picture myself. Mistake. Before I know it Alan and I are thrust into the photo and carefully maneuvered to the front. We grin cheesily and slightly awkwardly admist a bunch of strangers and shout “Aubergine!” at the cameras. “Qie zi”, meaning aubergine, is the Chinese version of “cheeeeessee” when posing for a photo.

Upstairs, the reception hall is like something out of a Barbie castle. Everything is draped in further pink tulle. Double happiness characters and emblazoned on every available space. A giant cinema screen sports a picture of the bride and groom in a field of purple flowers. On the tables there are chocolates, sunflower seeds and piles of cigarettes. In many ways it is like a theatrical production. There is a handsome ‘presenter’ who shouts into a microphone. The crescendo of his voice seems to have no relation to the meaning of his words. He shouts and shouts louder and builds up to a climax and I expect a burst of applause but then he just starts a new sentence and builds it up in the same way. There are full on theatre lights everywhere. Shortly before 11.05 the groom appears. He walks down the ‘aisle’ with a bouquet of flowers. All spotlights are on him. A version of a Spice Girls song plays in Chinese as he walks. He introduces a film which has many different shots of the bride and groom posing in traditional Chinese costume; dressed up like emperors; wearing Western wedding clothing and frolicking in autumn leaves. 11.05 strikes. The giant doors at the back of the hall open the groom walks halfway down the aisle towards the door accompanied by blaring music by Enya. He gets down on one knee and offers the bouquet up. The bride enters and takes it. They walk back to the stage.

Things get better from there. The bride and groom light a giant wreath of candles in the shape of a heart. They fill up a pyramid of champagne glasses. There are speeches by various people. We are mentioned in two speeches. At one point we have to stand up and wave when our name is called and the whole wedding applauds us. The best bit is a ‘game show’. On giant screens it flicks through everyone’s name at the wedding. A guest shouts ‘start’ into the microphone and it flicks faster, then they shout ‘stop’ and the person whose name it lands on wins a piece of elaborately wrapped tupperware. Brilliant. I even got to shout ‘start’ and ‘stop’!

Then we ate. Cakes made into hearts. Pigeon heads and various other unidentifiable substances. During the meal we toast the bride and groom and their families and have our picture taken with nearly everyone in the hall.

What a day! We were completely blown away by how generous and welcoming everyone was and how much they wanted everyone to be involved.

We were also introduced to a combination of three letters worth remembering in a lot of situations: ‘T.I.C’. This is China.