Springing Xining

Spring has sprung in Swinging Xining!

As Beijing is greeted by the twin delights of snow and David Beckham, Xining's trees are budding, cardigans have replaced down jackets, and the sky blushes an eggshell blue.

Spring breezes are here too, to scatter the evil pollution which blanketed the city last week, causing wheezing of the old folk and myself, Dickensian grey skies, and the air quality indicators to spin off the scale. 

Our PM10 slithered past 1000! Beat that Beijing!

Here are a few moody black & white shots of Swinging Xining as it shimmies into Spring!

Hallelujah, as the Xining missionaries like to say on occasion!

a toddler learning to drive, and like many of the adult drivers, on the pavement!

this award-winning shot if only i had entered it in a contest is xining's nandajie (big south street) from the 85 bus (handy for the coffee shops)

you can just see the frog-green buds on the trees. xining's spring has sprung!

mysteries of monlam

After Losar, Tibetan New Year, comes Monlam -- the Great Prayer Festival.

Swinging Xining with its mosques, KFCs, crazy drivers and neon chickens doesn't offer much in the way of Monlam so I took myself off to Rebgong (Tongren in Chinese), a Tibetan monastery town, a two-hour drive on a new highway to see the monks in action.

The great wonder of Monlam is the swarms of Tibetans who swamp the town to attend the festival. I'm not much good at estimating numbers, but I'd say 10,000 was in bouncing distance of the ball park.

Families, grandparents with sun-sleepy infants perched on their shoulders, individuals, old ladies with sticks more boisterous than most were everywhere.

And all the monks of course.

And a sprinkling of aggressive Chinese photographers, who manoeuvred infants into cute poses for whatever blog, magazine, weibo they were posting to.

I complained to one lady from Xining. 

"Yes," she said, with a little laugh. "You foreigners are very polite at things like this. But us Chinese we're not like that. We just like to take our pictures."

Well. It's up to the Tibetans to complain if they didn't like it, I conceded. "But if you want to take my photo I want 10 yuan."

The Tibetans showed remarkable patience just sitting around in the sun for whatever religious ceremony was played out that day. But when any religious relics appeared on the scene, they were like a beast with no head in their single-minded pursuit to touch the holy object. 

It was a real monlam mash.

The town itself, a scruffy medley of tower blocks, Hui butchers and concrete fronted storefronts had a carnival atmosphere, albeit subdued.

Tibetans filled up hotels and hostels and sat snacking on sausages, noodles, and fried pancakes peddled by the entrepreneurial Hui's, some of whom had set up plastic-sheeted makeshift huts which served as canteens.

Here are some images from those three days:

Day one: sacred relics are taken out of their dusty temple corners and displayed to the public. It is good luck to touch the relic with your forehead.

Day two: This monk uses a bendy branch to make space in the courtyard. This is your best chance to get whipped by a monk and have a good excuse.

This little boy gets the royal view on the bony yet sturdy shoulders of his lovely grandpa who offered me his stool so I could see over the crowds. I declined. I had put on a little holiday weight and the stool was on its last legs.

The giant tangka emerges like a supreme sausage. It is also holy and people surged forward to touch their foreheads to its snaky body.

The tangka is unfurled on the hillside. As the covering is raised, the women around me -- grandmothers to teenagers started prostrating while others began singing a wonderful religious chorus. I felt like I was in a National Geographic documentary.

Day three. The monks gather in their Monlam best to blow conch shells in a circle.

Big shoulder pads on this monk. This is in the square. Mountains with slivers of snow in the backdrop. Lovely!

Several monks had ipads which they used to record Monlam.

I followed this beautiful Amdo boy around all day. He agreed to the photo but was too shy to talk to me. Better than any Khampa Hanzi any day.

 That's Monlam for you. Bloody marvellous!!

Snow in Xining

An overnight snowfall earlier this week turned Swinging Xining into a snow wonderland. Briefly...

Two days later the sun and human activity has melted the snow away, except for small patches of dirty brown in the city's nooks.

Is the Water Snake shedding her skin?

crusty snow underfoot is fun to walk through

xining's twin towers, home of teachers and missionaries

I've lost my momo!

If Austin Powers came to Swinging Xining, he could get his mojo back with a plate of these juicy and plump dumplings, called momos in Tibetan.

Lovingly stuffed by young Khampa boys in the kitchen of The Black Tent, these mashed potato dough pillows have kept us going in the culinary dark hole of Swinging Xining.

Despite a family of cheeky rats living in the rafters, the occasional guest appearance of my mojo-extinguishing Khampa-ex with his Bert Reynolds sidekick, and the owners' obsession with Phurbu T Namgyal (his CD is on repeat, repeat, repeat) this Yushu-owned Tibetan eatery is a veritable Friday-night treat. 

Here is a photographic ode to Xining's finest momos.

some tangkas need to be veiled like a young bride

lobsang, tastier than his potato momos

even the ceiling is beautiful at the black tent

Lobasang's older brother and now main man at the black tent

every table gets a pot of tea, in 3D. 

paying their respects

Loopy New Year

With 5,000 years of history, you'd think China would come up with a more sophisticated way of celebrating Lunar New Year.

Something beautiful. Something creative.

But the Lunar witches have the following three ingredients in their Chinese New Year cauldron:

1. sulphurous, dangerous, ear-splitting, pointless firecrackers. don't stop till you drop, sonny boy. they were banned in China until 2005.
2. Presents that range from cartons of teeth-rotting sweet milk to the liver-rotting shiny cases of rice wine.
did i mention eggs? 
3. Celine Dion singing in Chinese on the CCTV new year gala variety show!

in Hong Kong Chinese New year is rung in with flower shows, lion dances, and temple fairs. 

"You're wasted," I said to a very drunken Chinese man in Aili bakery. "I'm wasted," he parroted swaying ever so slightly as I bought my sliced wholewheat loaf. 

"Have you been at the baijiu (rice wine)?" I asked in Chinese. 

"Yes of course," he smiled. "All Chinese men must drink at New Year."

Indeed they must!

Here are some shots of the debris on my campus, the morning after. I'll leave you to guess which one is Celine's fault.

Exiting my apartment building

The entrance to my mansion

Cultural hegemony

Practicing depth of field. Empty firecracker crap

A nice tree. More depth of field practice. Pretty good if I say so myself.

A university building with smelly toilets

haunted university. pocket shot.

collateral damage

Swinging Xining

You've heard of the Swinging Sixties. Well they have nothing on Xining: the city of swingers. And Hui Muslims. Yes there are more mosques in this city than you can waggle a white skullcap at but in the meantime here are some white, black and pink shots of the swinging city. All snaps were taken on a Samsung child's smartphone with the snazzy little Vignette app for Android (available here for free).

Xining pretending to be Paris: Thoughtful man on bench, Qi Yi Lu, Swinging Xining

Swinging Xining cares for nature

Swinging Xining embraces alien cyclists

Kumbum Monastery: a teaser for the next post...

Xining Snaps!

I'm not referring to a giant bending over, taking both ends, and cracking the city in two. 

Rather, I mean, we took our cameras out and snapped some photos.

It started off as a typical winter morning - bleary, grey skies of underpant grey.

Here's the front gate of our university. A friend studying in the UK has herons on an idyllic small lake on her campus. We have runaway Siberian hamsters, open drains bubbling with sewage and undercover cops on ours!

We took the 35 to the bus station or རླངས་འཁོར་འབབ་ཚགས་for those in the know.

Behind the Tibetan market is a large complex of corrugated shop fronts selling giant packs of biscuits (I use the word biscuit in the loosest possible sense - think of chemical wafers), cartons of juice (again juice in the loosest sense of the word -- the closest those drinks came to a fruit was when someone flicked cigarette ash on them in the factory),  sacks of tea, and big boxes of firecrackers and fireworks. Nasty things. So I took a photo of something else red. 

Zooming through these narrow market alleyways were goods-laden mini-tractors, roaring like they were -- as my friend noted -- in a James Bond movie car chase. Teenaged drivers whooping in boyish, albeit reckless, delight. It was too much for my fragile nerves so after a quick snap of this political blackboard we left this shopping heaven...

...for another building site. This is Xining's old and new train station. Currently under construction, here it is next to the dry, tiled river. Sadly it won't be finished for another few years. Wikitravel says it is being readied for a new high speed rail access to Lanzhou and Urumqi!  

On the way east out of Xining you can see new rail tracks being laid down. 

Inside the bus station of blue plastic seats and grubby travellers, there are two very good Tibetan bookshops. I bought the "Government Officials Guide to Spoken Amdo!" from a lovely Amdo woman who wore the hint of lipstick and smiled lots.

Healthy living is alive and kicking in Xining. Check out this bike tied up opposite one of the snack stalls (I use the word snack very loosely). 

Across the other side of the city is where the KFCs live. 

Here is the local paper seller and the busy bus stop nearby my gym. You get alsorts waiting here. Including me.

That's Xining snapped for you!