I don't get all the annual hate over fruitcakes. Have you ever had a well-made fruitcake? They make it with rum.

Am I making myself obvious here? Fruitcakes are booze. They're basically cocktails in dessert form. How can you not like this? Fruitcakes are heavy and dense for the same reason highball glasses only hold 8 ounces. You're not supposed to consume a lot of them.

I reckon most people only encounter prepackaged fruitcakes a là Trader Joe. That's like judging martinis because you can't stand Shirley Temples.

On the American West Coast we say “Gung Hay Fat Choy” but that’s apparently Cantonese. In Mandarin you say “Gong Xi Fa Cai.” You write it the same either way. It means something like “Happy New Year,” I guess. Although “Happy New Year” is actually (literally) “Xing Nian Kuai Le” (性年快乐). So I don’t know what Gong Xi Fa Cai means at all. You can say either one.

We’re back in Xiamen from our far-too-brief trip to Bali. There’s a lot to digest about Bali, and our experiences there. The trip itself was an exercise in contrast. The hard part about leaving China knowing you’ll return is that China is going to suffer in the comparison. For example, Balinese bricklayers work methodically and lay lovely straight walls with nicely square bricks. They like their brickwork so much they leave it exposed. You will never see this in China. When you travel to a place and you find yourself saying to your spouse, “they do much nicer bricklaying here than back home,” you can bet there will be other things they do better Here than Back Home. Like cooking food, picking up trash, refraining from spitting on the sidewalk, and being polite to strangers. They drive worse, though, and that’s saying a lot. There will be two or three more Bali-related posts, by the way.

Anyway, today is Chinese New Year and everything is closed. This is indescribably eerie. For example, right now it’s about 6 pm and we can hear birds chirping in the forest behind our building. Almost no traffic noise, and absolutely no construction noise. This is literally the first time—and I mean the first timespan greater than 10 or 15 minutes—in which we have not heard the racket of construction from our apartment. This includes the night time hours, by the way.

The plane from Singapore to Xiamen was packed with Chinese; I think we were the only foreigners. Our fellow passengers drank copious amounts of free international flight beverages. We had the bad luck to be sitting one row from the toilets; at all times there were at least five people in line waiting for the toilet. After the first couple of hours it stopped being annoying and started being amazing. They never stopped peeing. Our fellow passengers would drink and drink (this was a 7 am flight, by the way), and then get up and take all that liquid ballast to the back of the plane. I wonder if some point of national pride weren’t at stake. Because the Silk Air stewardesses are not idiots, they didn’t serve enough to get anyone drunk; they rotated in orange juice and soda. So this wasn’t a drinking contest so much as it was a urine production contest.

We’re about two weeks away from Chinese New Year, which is the largest (by American standards, only) holiday in China. The upcoming year is Year of the Pig, which is my year (1971). Apparently, good things happen on “your year.”

Everything’s coming up Paul! I am gonna own Lunar Year 2007.

One of our neighbors has purchased a rooster. He was rising really early, like 5 am, but he’s getting lazy. I didn’t hear him until about 7 today. All the laowai in our building hope he’s for the New Year feast, because somehow a rooster is much more annoying at 5 am than construction noise.

A morning cock-call (heh heh, I said “cock”) is a sound from my childhood. My grandmother Souders (in Merna, Nebraska, population 400) had neighbors with chickens. So it’s actually kind of a comforting sound, especially as China does not appear to share any birds with North America. Bird calls, like the sound of freight trains in the distance, are the kind of noise that I never noticed until they were absent.

OK, so it's been, what, two weeks now? I have excuses.

The day after Christmas Axoplasm.com stopped working. In China. Everyone else on Earth can see it. After a little digging I'm 99% certain the site has been placed on the official list of banned websites. No, I don't know why and no, there isn't anything I can do about it. Government action in China is like the weather: uncaring and unpredictable.

That night we had the earthquake. OK, Taiwan had the earthquake but we felt it here. Jenny and I were having dinner with friends and talking about local wines when our host shouted "Earthquake!" Everyone thought this was a brand of Chinese wine (and it would probably be an accurate brand name) but then we noticed the Swaying. The room and everything in it moved in broad, slow circles. It was gentle and kind of exciting. About two minutes later we got an aftershock: stronger and nastier, with much rattling of plates and windows.

The quake did no lasting damage in Xiamen but plenty of damage to the seabed just south of Taiwan where, coincidentally, someone keeps all the major communications cables connecting Asia to everywhere else. Taiwan, Korea, southern Japan, and China all had major outages. So even if the gummint let me see Axoplasm, I couldn't have updated it anyway. It's taken a couple of weeks but we have some (most?) of our connectivity back, although it's still broken in many baffling ways. Upstream traffic, for example, is still bad: thus can't upload photos to Flickr.

On New Year Eve day I caught an intestinal bug. Life just keeps getting funner! Ironically, the only restaurants we ate at that day were spendy Western places. Other than some minor Montezuma's revenge-type stuff back in August we've been blessedly free of G-I distress. But this thing I had this time...it was bad. I'll try not to be graphic but what was coming out looked a lot like what was going in. That ain't right. On the third day I went to a nearby Western clinic (with an English-speaking doctor) who basically said, yep, you ate something bad.

Luckily my plumbing was groovy by last Wednesday, when Jenny's sister Michelle flew in from Portland for a visit. We spent the end of our vacation in Hong Kong, about which I'll write in the next post.

...Means Merry Christmas! In Pinyin it’s written Shengdan kuaile, pronouncing the es as short “uh” sounds. It’s fine weather for it: about 20C (70° F?) and hazy. And by “hazy” I mean “about as polluted as L.A. on the worst day you could imagine.”

Jenny and I have been off work since last Wednesday and have had a slow vacation for it. We’ve decided not to make a big deal out of Christmas which is fine by me. We’re saving our money and festive spirit for Michelle’s visit and its attendant trip to Hong Kong. Where I can finally buy some damn pants.

We went pants shopping the day before last...we particularly went to a Levi’s store in the mall, because I’ve been wearing Levi’s, gosh, my whole life, so I figured I’d be able to find something there that fit. Levi’s jeans are made differently in China. They’re made for Chinese bodies. For small waist sizes (i.e. the size I should wear), I literally couldn’t pull them over my thighs. For large waist sizes (i.e. what I wear here), I could button them up OK. And then them pull them straight off. Without unbuttoning them first. Chinese blue jeans are like two denim tubes stitched together. I bet they sell a lot of belts here. Jenny could find jeans that fit pretty well through the waist and butt, but of course they were 2 or 3 inches too short.

We explained this to our Mandarin teacher: Zai Meiguo, Paul shi shoule; zai Zhongguo, Paul shi pang. (“In America, Paul was skinny. In China, Paul is fat.”) I even know how to write this in Hanzi: 在美国，Paul是瘦了。 在中国，Paul是胖。 This is the kind of linguistic accomplishment I’ve been making lately.

Yesterday we rode our bikes around the east end of the island, and over the hill behind the University. We ate at our favorite noodle place for Christmas Eve dinner, and went to a friend’s place for eggnog.

For 圣诞节 we have no plans at all. The holiday is kind of a curiosity to the Chinese, on par with Cinco De Mayo in the U.S. Businesses are still open and most people don’t celebrate it at all. In some ways it will be a regular Monday for us: the maid is coming, and we have Mandarin lessons tonight. I think we’ll do a little shopping. Again, this is fine by me. I’m reminded of my first Christmas in Oregon (1995). I spent it with Jason Tand in Oregon. We spent the entire day watching Buck Rogers reruns.