Greetings from China II

It is this very special time of the year where you come together with your family, meet old friends that you have not seen for a very long time, and play in the snow as if you were a child again…it is Christmas….and I am in China….not only am I in China I also have to work…this is what I was worried about the most the whole time I thought about these 3 months ahead of me and now it happened, my first Christmas away from home, and I don’t have to tell you how much I love Christmas.

My mom tried to prepare me as good as possible J We went to the very first Christmas market within 50 km on the first November weekend to get at least one cup of Glühwein and some Christmas jingles. We baked Christmas cookies 7 weeks before Christmas which had never happened before and my mum mastered her skill in packing the cookies in a way that they don’t get squashed but stay light for my luggage. I did not get only one advent calendar but three and next to my Christmas present was a smaller wrapped up box that said “vomNikolausfür Hannah” (on 6^th of December we celebrate the Saint Nikolaus, a german bishop who looks very much like the English Santa Clause). I was ready to go.

Well when me and with one day delay also my suitcase finally arrived in China I excitedly told my also German roommate about aaaaall the Christmassy things I brought for us while opening my suitcase. When I unzipped the zipper a little paper note slid out of the suitcase saying: “detection of a prohibited object: sparkles” and there it was, my nice present, which was beautifully wrapped in read wrapping paper with white snowflakes and reindeers and complemented with a big green ribbon ripped open and all the little presents inside just spread over my suitcase….if I get them those border control, customs , what every people who did this to my Christmas surprise!!!!!

But well…I landed on the 29^th of November so from the next day on my roommate and I would alternate in opening the Lindt chocolate advent calendar and the one with little pictures and I would bring the tea out of my tea advent calendar every day to work in my new early Christmas present bottle that I got in advance from my sister, who did not want to wait until I got back with the Christmas gift giving ;) My Christmas mood was on. As it should be during December the first week was also surprisingly cold, but unfortunately I did not bring my proper winter jacket since my dad convinced me that I am flying to a subtropical part of China, which can be freeeezing cold as everybody who ever went to Shanghai can prove me right I guess, but then the sun came.

And with every day of sun the hard built up Christmas mood melted away. Christmas in China is very commercial and there are trees and lights and glitter and more colorful blinking lights and more glitter everywhere!!! But that is just not how it is at home…. From day one on me and my roommate looked for a nice thing to do on Christmas Eve but with a salary of 2000 Yuan we just simply could not afford one of the fancy Christmas dinners for 700- 1500 yuan offered by the western 3-5 stars hotels and since our service apartment was only equipped with one knife, one pot, a plastic bowl and a porcelain plate and one hotplate and no oven a self-made Christmas dinner was also impossible.

My first weeks here at the office were quite tough and with a bad feeling every day after work and no motivation whatsoever to go to the office in the morning the first indications of homesickness and counting the days that I already had managed and that were still ahead of me did not really cheer me up and I promised myself never to be away from home over Christmas ever again.

Three days before Christmas we heard about this newly opened German restaurant that offered a fairly cheap Christmas dinner with self-brewed beer and I decided to get my shit together and make the best out of it and convince everybody in the office to join me. Sure we had no oven but my mum sent me plenty of Christmas pralines that you can make without one so I wrote a big shopping list, packed my big backpack and went full of motivation to spend the whole night in the kitchen making cookies for everybody to the next Carrefour that, as I heard, has a fairly big section of imported foods. The disappointment was big when I realized that the imported food section is still only a section of 4 shelves,which of course does not have such exotic things as nougat, marzipan or coconut flakes. But well let’s be creative. I ended up buying the ingredients for the most expensive chocolate crossies, that I always thought were so boring when I was little because they were so easily made (chocolate covered cornflake drops) , that you could dream of, as well as a package of pasta, pesto and a bottle of red wine for Christmas day, our special western Christmas dinner.

I spent the whole evening in the kitchen, making my cookies and listening, at least most of the time when the internet did not break down to Christmas music. Luckily China has not discovered and censured spotify yet ;). When I woke up the next day I was actually very excited, it was Christmas!!! We packed our cookies and went to the office with a big smile on our faces and you should have seen the smiles on the faces of our Chinese co-workers when we gave them our cookies!!! They loved them and everybody tried to find some small thing they could give us in reward!!! I have not yet figured out why but in China people give their beloved apples for Christmas so we ended up with at least 10 apples each, a nut, some soda, a small glass of honey, a sweater from the 2002 collection of a customer and even a big Christmas sock of the company, filled with sweets, nuts…well and Chinese meat things that I still have to dare to try. I was very satisfied and happy. We left work early, went home to change into our nice Christmas dresses and went to the Christmas dinner.

Well of course the reservation somehow got lost and our friends were 1 hour to late due to the ridiculous traffic but in the end we all made it and even got a table. Since we were all so excited to have a fancy Christmas dinner none of us had had lunch and we were starving to death. By the time the first beer was finished the first small plate of salad finally made it two our table. Well we knew that Chinese people are not very good in serving the food all at the same time but when the second course, one bowl of soup joined the one small plate of salad on the table we realized that this would not actually be a 9 course meal for everyone of us but a Chinese styled dinner  where everything just gets put on the table to share. The good thing about this “German” restaurant was the beer though and by the time the dessert came, before the steak and fries and 3 hours after we arrived our stomachs were filled with beer perfectly fitting to the German saying “seven beers are also a Schnitzel” and the English term ”eating is cheating”.  The 5 hours 9 courses meal for 7 people was accompanied by 27 small glasses of beer, three cold glasses of glögg, a Chinese wedding proposal, a life band and a belly dance show.  We were surprised, that besides us there were only  6 other western people in the restaurant, the Spanish manager of the restaurant, one German couple that left the restaurant after one our because the girlbroke out in tears and the band, which explains why the whole night was very Chinese with a lot of filming and posting and taking pictures and selfie sticks and being busy not talking to the people on your table…I really had to think of my mum when the wedding proposal presenter started talking and the volume was sooo high that I, a big fan of loud electronic music, for the first time stuffed tissue balls in my ears just like her when we were listening to a jazz concert. 

Since our little Christmas party crew did not know each other very well but it is still nice to unpack something on Christmas we decided to do trash gift giving. A game where everybody just gets some cheesy, cheap crap or wraps something they find under their bed in newspaper and bring it as a gift. To make it a bit more fun you don’t just give the present to anyone but make a little dice game out of it. Unfortunately our Chinese guests did not really get the whole trash thing too well and ended up buying nice Starbucks mugs (Starbucks is the shit here) and imported body lotions (they don’t trust the Chinese stuff) so we ended up randomly changing the rules to make sure they would not get one of your crappy things and prevent them from reminding Christmas gift giving as a horrible disaster.

After the dinner our Chinese friends left us and the German crew hit the clubs until 6 in the morning. It was a very different Christmas indeed and had nothing to do with Christmas at home but I would not have wished to imitated that since it would not have been the same anyways and with all the chaos and noise and tears and alcohol, it really was a very nice, very special evening. And as a good friend of mine said: Christmas is a feeling! And this feeling has never been as strong as this year:  to enjoy the small things in life: a phone call from my parents, a Christmas card form my grandparents and a big smile and an apple from my co-workers, to revive old traditions, an advent calendar, self-made Christmas cookies, and a nice pasta and pesto dinner on Christmas day and to be thankful for what you have: a great family and friends, at home and in China.