Winter solstice - beware your ears

Yesterday was Dongzhi, or the middle day of winter. And it was also the day I appeared in the Shaanxi Daily. Click the link below:

http://www.sxdaily.com.cn/data/bsxakb/20091223_9775744_2.htm

The person next to me is a friend, opposite are two of her friends. All very innocent. And yes, a lack of regular physical activity has made me fatter, although in my defence, the angle is unfavourable and that pose was deliberate...

The Chinese text of the story reads as follows:
"Yesterday was Dongzhi, which means, as the saying goes, 'If you don't have a bowl of dumplings, no-one will sympathise with you if your ears freeze and fall off'. [My translation perhaps leaves a lot to be desired.] In the area around Dachejia Street [the street I live on] and the Xiangzi Temple, all the restaurants were thronging with people, with long queues stretching out the door. This excitement also attracted foreigners. This foreign chap is enjoying his dumplings on Dongzhi just like us Chinese!"

Google Translate produces a slightly different version, perhaps showing that computers can't do everything:
“Yesterday was the 24 integrity of the winter solstice, folk known as "the winter solstice misconduct dumplings bowl, frozen out Ear nobody, "the folk. The day, reporters in the cart Wenjiaxiang Xi'an, Hunan several sub-Temple Street The shop selling dumplings, dumplings and saw people who's interest is high, and everyone at the door waiting in a long Long. This lively scenes are infected with a foreigner. You see, the foreign dignitaries and the Chinese people, like the Winter Solstice dumplings to eat something!”

Apologies for the infection...

Yesterday I think I had about ten to fifteen people ask me if had eaten jiaozi (dumplings). Being a foreigner and generally nonplussed by festivals of all denominations, I figured I could take the risk of my ears falling off. But in the evening a friend phoned me up and said they were at a restaurant near my flat. It turns out I go past this restaurant every day, but names of restaurants are even harder to remember than Chinese people's names.

The three of them had waited for ages to be seated, and they called me just when they were getting a table. The restaurant has cannons outside and is adorned on the inside with pictures of emperors and replica clothing from the Qing Dynasty. Given the relationship in the past between the Qing Dynasty, Britain and cannons, I stayed away from mentioning the theme of the restaurant. Minimum expenditure per person was 40 kuai, comfortably exceeding my prediction. I don't like ordering food for other people, so I left the three of them to ensure 160 kuai was well spent.

The food was actually excellent, as it usually is. The same greenery (cauliflower, cabbage) that gets cooked in England and tastes awful tastes much better when it emerges from a Chinese kitchen. The suffering English children endure with greens during their childhood is not a misery inflicted upon their Chinese counterparts. There was also some beef on a bone. You put in a straw in the bone and drink the juices, then don some plastic see-through gloves and knaw away at the meat. It was actually very good once I had managed to put the gloves on.

Halfway through, I noticed a photographer taking some photos. Being the token foreigner in the restaurant, it was pretty obvious what he wanted - a picture of a waiguo pengyou (foreign friend) eating jiaozi on Dongzhi and holding his chopsticks badly. He took quite a lot, and I'm impressed, and of course grateful, that he managed to choose such a bad photo.

Conversation was the usual unfilling pap. My friend is okay but her two friends were a fairly common type of female university student - immature, no personality, a bad case of Little Emperor attitude and zero sense of humour. After finding out I've been here for two and a half years, they then asked me if I could use chopsticks. A silly question deserves a sarcastic response. I said no, and when I did use them, they were flabbergasted. In situations like these (which occur all the time), I can go a whole evening just humouring myself. It sounds rude, but it's either that or talking about mobile phones or brand name bags or the difference between American English and British English and other incredibly tedious topics.

But getting your photo in the provincial daily – not bad, that.

STOP PRESS: I've just spent the entire evening walking around the centre of Xian. After going to 12 newspaper stands, one bookshop and two hotels, I discovered that my photo has appeared in the worst selling newspaper in the entire province. Of all 15 places, only one had three old copies of the Shaanxi Daily. The answer for this was explained to me by the owner of the last newspaper stand - it's the official Party paper, so no one reads it. Given the unflattering photograph, perhaps this is a good thing.