Sinoed: New Year Chinese-style on Xiamen's Gulangyu

Gulangyu is an island near Xiamen (which in turn is a bigger island itself). It's a pretty cool little place, and every time I go there I discover something new - culture-wise and geography-wise. It looks like a little fairy-tale land, with narrow winding streets and remnants of European mansions - leftovers from the concession times. Not thinking too long about where to meet the dawn of the New Year, my friend and I decidedly mounted a bus and in 1.5 hours were in Amoy (another name for Xiamen),

then took a ferry to the Gulangyu island and there we were, looking for a nice hotel to house a small New Year party. After searching through the dark and beautiful streets of Gulangyu for an hour we stumbled upon a very nice place called The Bay View Inn (228RMB (US$28.5) per night - I very rarely pay THAT much for a hotel in China).
We had no view of the bay (neither did any other rooms) - hopefully the second and third floors which were under construction will provide the justification for this name. But our windows looked on a busy central street. Now - the beauty of the whole thing is that on Gulangyu any motor-driven vehicles are prohibited, so are bicycles - making this little central street a really nice venue.

The 31st of December we spent frolicking around malls and small shops, eating tasty things and buying take-outs for our New Year hotel party for two. Noteworthy are such events of the day as
- rush-stomping up a down-going escalator in a mall.

- a visit to a Jackie Chan store with unbelievably high prices - which undermined my good feelings towards the Australian star; we saw a t-shirt signed by him, and various clothes items with price tags featuring figures usually 10 times higher than those you find on similar quality/design items but with different brand names. I would have thought of buying something had he sewn it himself, but label-flashing is not for us, simple folks as we are.

(To tell the truth this very picture was taken about half a year ago, but also in Xiamen and near another Jacky Chan store - he got it pretty much covered around this part of the world.)

- eating unbelievably tasty noodles in a small restaurant. I made 4 trips to that place in 2 days because of the delicious stuff.

- waiting in another even smaller eatery while the cook was making our holiday noodles and veggies according to our several-times-changing order, and if he didn't have the ingredients his wife would rush out of the shop to buy things like mushrooms and cauliflower from a hawker, who was standing right outside for just the occasion with two enormous baskets and a shoulder-yoke.

The transformation of the calendar dates was greeted on a deserted beach/embankment under a huge tree, illuminated with stars and lights from distant streetlamps against the acoustic background of murmuring waves, every now and then splashing into the rocks. This unbearably romantic atmosphere was spiced up with the surprisingly-not-so-cold-for-the-time-of-year East China Sea itself, which whispered to me tenderly - Serge, Serge, come into me, meet the New Year within my welcoming waves... - the exhortations being cut abruptly and jealously by my companion. I guess that's simple because she can't swim, that's all. But romantic welcoming of the New Year did happen alright. I was even allowed to wet my feet in this alluring ocean's affiliate. Was pretty bearable. But not like in the summer, you know.

The walk back to the hotel was truly amazing. The empty streets were lighted magically, with little flags and Christmas lights over the crooked pavements, two-storeyed buildings from two centuries ago, toy houses with Christmas trees and real-size Santa Clauses, all created a feeling of something unreal and unbearably beautiful.

One half of us (and that was not me) dared to jump over the small fence of a toy composition "Santa and his snow-clad house" and amicably patted Santa on the shoulder like he was her old buddy. It didn't startle me much (but it did scare her of course) after Santa jerked and started moving his hips in a slow dance to the sweet Christmas song which reverberated with excellent acoustics through the cobble-stone streets, his beard and white hair swaying along with his movements. It was a fairy-tale feeling, as we walked away from the dancing Santa, the music imbuing through the deserted lane's windows. Luckily nobody shouted from them, and this only added up to the feeling of calm joy. It's funny though that we were about the only people who celebrated the beginning of the new year; for the majority of the Chinese it's not an event at all.

The first day of January was spent discovering new places on the island. We saw old mansions behind wrought gates, with turrets and even people living in some.

One even had something like a squash or a pumpkin precariously growing right above the gate.

We saw a film crew shooting a flick in one of the streets, we had even found a hotel where they all stayed, thus making it difficult for us a day before to find an accommodation. An interesting thing walking on Gulangyu - everywhere you can see dozens of cats walking on their own anywhere they like. Especially it's amazing in the night, when in every little lane you turn to, there is a cat looking at you. But the most interesting thing is that the majority of the cats we saw were white ones; the second place held purely black ones, and it was only about twice that we noticed 'normal' multi-colored common cats. Do they breed them on purpose or is it a natural taste of the felines for the likes of themselves, since they seem to be free as a wind on those streets?

White cats against a white wall. Almost after Polenov.

A cool case of the Chinese reality we present here - strange as it seems, there was a truck in one of the streets in Gulangyu - probably working graveyard shifts for locals away from central streets - the driver was having his feet-above-the-heart exercise sleeping in the daytime.