Travel with Al: Relaxing China Style

As you may or may not know, the Chinese people absolutely love a public holiday. They have millions of them for various reasons, some logical, some less so. As it turns out, Sunday was one of the 'less so' ones. According to the lunar calendar Sunday was mid-autumn festival day, and as a result a public holiday.

The significance of this holiday is not important, what is important is that my school gave me sunday off and Skye's work gave her Monday off, these facts coupled with our regular days off meant that for the first time since arriving in Beijing Skye and I had two days off together. Hoorah!

We decided to spend the sunday relaxing Chinese style, as a result, we headed off to the nearest public park and just wandered about on the concrete paths and admired the perfectly manicured lawns (which must be landmined because no-one and I mean NO-ONE ever breaches the santurary of the path and steps on the grass) and lovely old trees.

The park we chose is particularly famous as it is on the only hill in all of Beijing. Naturally the hill was man made in the 1400 by an emperor who fancied a panoramic view of his city and people (that is of course when he was allowed to venture out of the Forbidden City, and across the road to the park.)

The place, as you can see from the photo's is both beautiful and busy.

But not just busy with people having picnics (there are no picnics because you can't walk on the god damn grass!) and maybe playing a bit of footy or something. No the park is filled with people doing what the Chinese love to do when the get any spare time... Karaoke!

As far as we could tell there were at least 7 different Karaoke set-ups, ranging from traditional opera with live bands, to weird Asian pop rubbish. Some had dancers, like this photo, others had these great picture boards with the music and the words to help out the singer.

It obviously goes without saying, however, you'll notice from the picture below that it was not just singing karaoke, but also instrumental, the elbow you see is a guy belting out everyone's favourite traditional tune on the chinese version of the violin.

Whilst I am being somewhat flipant about the Chinese love affair with Karaoke, I have to say it was bloody fantastic. Chinese people know how to have a good time. they don't get bogged down with all the rubbish about what others think, or how they look, they don't worry very much about silly ego issues at all, instead they throw caution to the wind and get up there, sing, dance or play instruments.

I can't help but think that at some stage in history, the Chinese must have had some contact with the Scots, because they share two great loves, singing in public places and getting roaringly drunk... not always in that order.

Before you ask, whilst I was invited several times to sing... after flipping through the song book I was simply unable to find 'I think we're alone now' by Tiffany, and so, whilst tempted I had to decline. However, Skye did flirt with the idea of trying out a bit of instrumental karaoke, as evidenced by the photo to my right, however, whilst she is very good on the gord flute (and I mean that seriously... those clarinet lessons were usuful after all!) we were unable to find a set up that needed an extra gord flutist and alas, Skye chance of 15 minutes of fame went begging.

However, she did managed to bargain the guy down to a decent price and so is now the proud owner of that very gord flute... of course we may both end up with Hep A, after the guy 'demonstrated' how to play it several times... But hey, its China!

Overall the park was bloody fantastic. We spent several hours just wandering around, listening to the karaoke, watching about 100 people ballroom dance (yes i know its random) there was even a 'speakers' corner where a few older blokes were chewing the ears of anyone that would listen. Luckily for us we couldn't understand a word they were saying. Although interestingly, some people were obviously saying things that were controversial because they were speaking very softly and the listeners were gathered around close. Having said that, we are in China, so speaking out about a controversial subject probably means slagging the very boring, heavily chinese focussed olympic games coverage (oops, this blog may get blocked after that comment....)

I shall leave you now with a few photo's of the park... enjoy.