Michele’s Missives — Spring Festival

It’s been a real long while now that we haven’t written a Michele’s Missives from China for everyone to read. There have been a number of reasons, not the least of which is that I haven’t felt up to typing for Mom (and Mom’s netbook is really too small for Mom to comfortably type on herself). Since the last time we all collaborated on writing one of these, Mom and Dad have both been getting a lot of exercise from Coach Marian (← Coach Attila the Hun). We’ve walked a minimum of a mile every day that we have left the apartment. There was even one day when we walked over two miles. Those of you who know my parents well know that neither of them is much in the habit of walking over a block or two a day.

Preamble aside, what’s been going on in China since we last wrote?

Over the Chinese New Year, pretty much everything closes. It’s the biggest holiday in China and there really aren’t words to accurately describe it until you have experienced it. The past couple of years, Marian has gotten into the habit of “fleeing the country until it’s all over”. As a boss, she gives her employees the month off because “it’s not like they’d be doing anything anyways”. Since we are visiting her, she couldn’t run away (well, I guess she could run away but it would be a lot harder than usual). The Civilized Cities Campaign currently ongoing in Haikou meant that there were a lot less firecrackers in the lead-up to the holiday than there were when we were here last but that doesn’t mean there weren’t a lot of firecrackers at 4am in the morning… 6am in the morning… 8am in the morning… it just means that it was merely like a movie version of D-Day rather than being like D-Day in reality.

At 1am the morning of New Year’s Day, you couldn’t see more than a block because of the fog over everything. Only, unlike the usual winter fog in Hainan, this one wasn’t made up out of ocean air but the black powder smoke of explosives.

Since nearly everything closed in the week leading up to New Year’s Eve and everything else closed the week afterwards, it meant that deciding where to go was a little harder than usual. We couldn’t go to the regular coffee shops, the regular restaurants, the regular anything. One day, we walked out towards the laobacha (that’s the dim-sum coffee cafeteria place) near Marian’s home only to find that it was shuttered tight and not planning on opening again for two weeks.

How will we survive?
No coffee!
REPEAT, this is a Grade One Brown Alert!
Caffeine withdrawal. 
Caffeine withdrawal. 
Caffeine withdrawal.

There is no coffee.
None.
NONE!

We left the closed coffee shop and walked towards the closest bus stop. On the way we passed by a dozen or more shuttered shops and restaurants. Some of them, like the fancy vegetarian Buddhist place are apparently never open (according to Marian). Others are ones that she’s used to seeing be open 24 hours a day. The streets were empty as well. At a typical intersection where you might otherwise see 40 or 50 e-bikes and pedestrians waiting to cross, there was no only one or two.

Getting on the next bus, we decided to play a “game” that Marian is fond of for exploring when traveling. She calls it Transit Roulette. The rules are quite simple: you get on a bus, you stay on the bus, you get off the bus. Later on, you get on another bus, or a train, or a boat, or a monorail. It doesn’t really matter what it is or where it is going. The idea is that there is too much interesting stuff to explore and too little time in which to explore it. Rather than set a specific goal of “I must go to Place X” you just wander. Tourist Attractions can be very interesting but, to weirdos like us, a guy in a business suit with a briefcase in one hand and a bucket of fish in the other is more interesting. Also, it is a truism that there are often many interesting smaller sites near the Main Attraction which are just as interesting, a third the price, and nearly empty of the hordes of selfie-taking tourists.

After about twenty minutes on the bus, Marian said “we’re going to get off at this stop”. She didn’t tell us why. She never tells us why. We got off anyway. We had no choice. She’s the only person we know who speaks both Chinese and English and, more importantly, she has all the local money on her. Even though ads for Amex or other credit cards say things like “never leave home without it”, hardly anyone in China takes foreign credit cards or credit cards.

It was a big park — a really big park. In terms of city parks, few parks in the world are this big. With the north and east sides of the park being a little misshapen because of the sea-wall, it’s still a square kilometer. That makes it about a third the size of Central Park in New York. Even taskmaster Attila didn’t think I could walk this but, that’s okay, she didn’t have walking in mind.
She had biking in mind.
Ehhhhhhhhhhh….

These weren’t your normal bikes that you might find for rent in a park — which was a good thing. For one, neither Ted nor I are exactly up for riding bikes around a park without hitting people or falling off. For another, I’ve got no experience with modern hand brakes having only ever ridden children’s bikes with the pedal backwards foot brakes (that barely stop anything and make Marian cringe every time I mention them). They weren’t even tandems or triples but were instead a sort of pedal-car with wooden bench seats and a big fringed canvas sun roof.

I tried and tried but I couldn’t even get my feet to reach the pedals for more than one or two pushes at a time. You’d think in a country with as many short people as China, they’d have stuff that worked for short people. Ted could reach the pedals and sometimes the pedals could reach Ted’s shins with a loud thump followed by a short scream. As a result, Marian, who was in the driver’s seat, provided most of the motive power. She and Ted both had steering wheels and they both steered. Only Marian’s was attached to anything but that didn’t stop him from reflexively trying really hard to keep from hitting people.

As befitted a sunny day on a holiday weekend after weeks of cold and cloudy weather, the park was full of people. Kids (and sometimes adults) ran with kites, blew bubbles, and laid down on the grass. People strolled through the park looking at the Lantern Festival exhibits that had already been put up. They sat on benches, held hands, took pictures of each other, and followed the signage which told them avoid littering and to drown carefully. (We didn’t see anybody drowning.)

Later on we sat on a bench in front of a booth with rifles and air balloons and cheap stuffed animals like the old Gwynn Oak Amusement Park. We smelled the aroma of caramel popcorn and cotton candy while listening to perennial favorites like an instrumental version of “She’ll Be Coming ‘Round the Mountain” played over a loudspeaker. The bathrooms were near a children’s area with rides, some of which were open, most of which were closed. Marian started laughing when she saw the Merry-Go-Round as, apparently, the Chinese word for that is literally “Revolving Horse”.

Another day, another game of Transit Roulette, and we stumbled across an open coffee shop called Moonstone Cafe. At the time we were intending to go walking in Old Town after a rather disappointing trip out to the end of the line during which time the only really interesting things we saw were a highway bridge under construction and our first parking meter in China. 
Some people go to see the Great Wall. 
Those people aren’t Rosenbergs.

Moonstone is more than a little influenced by the original A to Z. It has the same white-painted exposed brick, the same blond wood bookshelves, the same giant blackboard wall, the same bare concrete floor, the same general layout. It even has some of the same employees and, when they left, they took with them the same idea of excellent service that most places in China fail to provide.

Marian still prefers the coffee at the microroastery, Pause. However, they are still closed for the holidays and, even in non-holiday periods, the area around Pause has less places for us to go eat. The coffee meets Marian’s standards, however, and given how much of a snob she has become about coffee that’s saying a lot. Our first time there I had a espresso con panno, Ted had an Americano, and Marian drank a salted milk tea.

Americanos are basically the espresso machine way of making Mr.Coffee drip coffee. It’s a shot or two of espresso with a bunch of hot water added. It’s not drip coffee but it tastes fairly similar. You can add milk or sugar or nothing depending on your tastes.

Espresso con panno, which I had, is espresso with cream. This is no the same as a latte (espresso with milk) or a cappuccino (espresso with foamed milk) but is something else altogether. At this shop, it’s two shots of seriously dark seriously thick espresso. It’s bitter but in a good way. The top two thirds of the cup are full of whipped cream and covered with a drizzle of chocolate syrup. Since this is China and whipped cream isn’t something you can just pick up in a can in the grocery store, it’s proper whipped cream made on site with no gelatin or fillers.

On another occasion, I had an iced caramel macchiato. The bottom of the glass was full of milk, there was a shot of espresso floating on top of that, and the top of that was covered with frothed whipped cream drizzled over with caramel sauce. I’ve also had their vanilla cinnamon latte and their mistranslated ‘chocolate muffin’ (a waffle). Marian has been primarily sticking to the non-caffeinated stuff since she likes to eventually go to sleep at night. She’s had a variety of teas and a mid-day strawberry mojito (putting up with these guys would make anyone want to drink in the middle of the day).