It's Snowing in Shanghai...

and we're off to the Philippines! Doesn't get much better than that. Back to Shanghai and back in touch on February 7.

It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Spring Festival

It's still 2007 technically here in China and will be until February 7, Chinese New Year's Day, when we'll all ring in the year of the rat. The rat is everywhere. Sometimes cute and sometimes rat-like. Spring Festival is definitely bigger than Christmas and everywhere you go, red lanterns hang and red paper-cuts of rats decorate the windows.

But for some reason, Santa is still up. The Christmas decorations in China were totally bizarre with Santa reigning king. No manger scenes or reindeer, just Santa in some totally bizarre incarnations...for instance, drinking martinis and playing the saxophone. Dig it.

And apparently you never have to take down your Santas because they're in every shop window still, now next to the rats. Maybe after Chinese New Year, they'll come down and who knows what will replace them. For now, Santa and the rat are hand in hand and the lucky color is red. Everything is red and Wal-Mart has these great displays of red underwear, in which I guess the whole country will be trying to score a baby rat this year. Dig it.

Halfway Point

Peter and I keep this list of things we should or want to blog about. The list is getting long and we never seem to have the free time to compose the witty detailed accounts of our life in China that I know you have come to expect from us. So, for now, we will have to settle on an update. If we wait until we have time to write 10 polished articles to post, you will never hear from us.

So, we are halfway through our time in China. We have a nice long semester break for Spring Festival, or Chinese New Year, and while we are enjoying our time off of school, we still manage to be incredibly busy. Many of our friends were only here for one semester so we have said goodbye to four friends in the last week and while a week's worth of going away parties has kept our social calendar packed, it has also put us in a bit of a funk--that all good things must come to an end sort of feeling--and we can't help but look ahead and wonder what on earth we will do when we leave China in five or so months. Peter will be teaching English at my university next semester. He wants to continue to expand his resume and the extra income will help us stock up for whatever comes next. This will be the first time we will be colleagues and I hope our working relationship will be as good as our personal one.

Speaking of work, Peter recently spent a full day working as an extra on a Chinese film set. He was a a member of a 1930s New York audience enjoying a Beijing opera performance. He was in the second row of the auditorium so we are sure to be able to spot him when the movie come out. Many of our friends and my brother went along as well, and while the entire experience was somewhat of a fiasco, they came away with many laughs, some fake facial hair, and a couple hundred RMB. The highlights were the Chinese men wearing women's blond wigs to make up for the fact that they couldn't get six hundred foreigners to show up to the shoot and when the make-up crew tried to take away Peter's real beard, convinced that they had given it to him (he lost his expensive mustache wig in the lunch buffet stampede). Pictures were forbidden, but Peter managed to snag this one of our adorable Colombian friends looking quite dashing (note blond Chinese man on the right).

I am enjoying my time off of teaching and am putting in a few extra hours at my travel job. I was recently commissioned to write a travel feature for a local English-language city living magazine due out next month, so now I can add a Chinese publication to my very short list. Peter and I will head to the Philippines next week for 10 days of beaches and jungles. We are very much looking forward to getting away from cold, soggy Shanghai. It's definitely time for a change of pace and I plan on eating my weight in mangos and getting back my tan which has been on vacation for years now.

The Spa

There's this spa that Gina introduced me to years ago when I first visited Shanghai. I'm pretty sure there's nothing like it in the rest of the city and possibly the rest of the world. I shared the spa with Peter soon after we moved here and we have subsequently exposed all our foreign friends to Xiao Nan Guo (Little South Land). Photos are strictly forbidden, but our friend George, who is moving back to the States at the end of the month and figured he'd risk deportation, was able to snap a few photos on our last visit. Now that our spa experience has been made public, I can share the details of it with you.

The trip begins with a long metro ride followed by a ten minute cab ride. The spa is so big it could easily be mistaken for a hotel. It's five floors of fun, but when you enter the lobby and exchange your shoes for a pair of rubber flip flops, there's no way you can know what you're getting into. You're then led to a locker room (men are separated from women at this point) where you strip down to nothing except your flip flops and enter the bathhouse.

The bathhouse portion of the experience involves a leisurely shower where you can brush your teeth and shave your legs at either sitting or standing shower stations. Once you're sufficiently clean you have your choice of soaking pools in a range of temperatures. Some have milk, some have tea, some have jets, and some are exactly your body temperature and perfectly still and make you feel like you have truly left your body. There's a steam room and a dry sauna with a TV playing Chinese soap operas. When you've soaked long enough you can sign up for a body scrub, which the Chinese take very seriously and while it borders on being painful having a mean Chinese woman take a brillo pad to your naked body, you will emerge red-skinned and purified having shed an entire layer of skin that had protected you from weeks of being sprayed with diesel exhaust and coal dust.

We usually spend an hour and a half in the bath and first-timers are very impressed thinking that the bath was a great experience and well worth the seven dollar entrance fee. But once they are toweled off by the changing room attendants and handed their Hawaiian-print muumuu and paper panties, they have a sinking feeling that it's not over yet. It's time to take in a show. Upstairs there's a huge auditorium with a stage surrounded by cushy recliners. You can pick your teeth, clean your ears, and drink a beer while young Chinese boys perform acrobatic and contortionist feats. Eventually a troupe of Russian girls in skimpy outfits entertains with an array of dance numbers and costumes. It's not Las Vegas, but the girls are endearing in their poor dance skills and you have to hand it to them for coming all the way to China to perform in such a venue (one wonders what promises were made when they left Mother Russia).

When the show is over you can join the rest of the floral-clad Chinese in any number of diversions. Play mahjong, watch TV, eat dumplings, work out, get a massage or a haircut or your eyebrows waxed, play ping pong, sleep--the possibilities are endless. We usually hit up the TV room, filled with recliners with personal flat screen TVs. We watch several different Chinese shows at once, drink beer, get our feet rubbed, eat peanuts, and chat. For an extra three dollars you can spend the night. We haven't opted for the slumber party yet, but it is always tempting when we have to get back into our street clothes, pay our tab, and get in a dirty Shanghai cab for the long late-night ride home.

I know there's nothing like this in the States...at least not for seven bucks and not with dancing Russian girls. Xiao Nan Guo is definitely on our list of things we will really miss about China. Here's the boys, Rasmus (Denmark), Peter, Andrjez (Latvia), and George (Arkansas), in their matching PJs.

Giant

Everyone says that when you move back to the States after being in China the portion-size seems enormous. Well, even though I have enjoyed the somewhat smaller meals here in Shanghai, some things are just gigantic.

Here is a picture of the chicken sandwich at our local restaurant (with my mouth for scale). This is our guilty pleasure and we indulge in it when we are just sick of Chinese food.

And here the world's largest pomelo (with my head for scale) found on New Year's Day in Wal-Mart.