My home state of Massachusetts is going through some hard times, just like everybody else in the US. But one of the biggest problems facing the state is the transit system. America’s oldest subway serves not just Boston, but the surrounding communities as well.

And it’s falling apart.

Today, the Boston Globe revealed that they had obtained a list of fairly draconian service cuts that the transit system’s operators, The MBTA, are planning on rolling out next year in order to close a $160 million budget deficit. This deficit has been brought on by massive amounts of debt accumulated over the past 15 years and a decline in revenues from the agency’s main source of funding: the state’s sales tax.

In a bad economy, it turns out, people buy less stuff. Go figure.

So now the state is faced with a tough choice: Infuse the system with lots of money to stave of the loss of services being proposed, or let busses and trains stop running at 7:00pm on weeknights in some places.

And with services in every sector of government -from park maintenance to healthcare for handicapped poor people- taking cuts, simply throwing money at the subway isn’t an easy choice.

I don’t pretend to have the answers to this dilemma, but what I do know is that this problem has been brought on by our -Americans’- disregard for public transit over the past generation. We’ve invested almost immeasurable amounts of money on roads and highways, but we let our rail systems languish and, in some cases, die off completely. And now we are shocked to discover that we actually might NEED these systems and that they -horror of horrors- cost ACTUAL MONEY to operate!

I had an IM exchange with my good friend Julie back in Boston about this very topic earlier today and she gave me permission to post it here. Except for spelling mistakes and formatting, this is the unedited conversation:

Julie: did you see the link I posted about the T?

Me:    Yes!

       Craziness!

       But necessarry.

Julie: No cutting the over inflated salaries and bonuses and bennies is necessary

       What they are doing is going to kill this city period

       It is a stupid move

Me: “They” are only doing what they have to. I agree that salaries should be cut first, but cutting salaries will not save anywhere near as much as the service cuts that they need/are proposing. Since I got here, I have seen just how little we in the US invest in/value our public transit system.

       You really have no idea how badly we handle our transportation systems until you come to a place where they take them as serious as life-or-death.

       You can’t really compare Boston with Beijing in terms of population and layout (Beijing has a pretty uniform onion-like design), but what you CAN compare are the attitudes towards transit. The Chinese decided a while back that they would accommodate easy movement of people all through the metro area.

       http://blog.wired.com/cars/2007/12/beijings-subway.html

       They’ve got a master plan to be completed by 2050 and it will get done.

       It just will.

       We can’t even decide on how to fund what we’ve already got, forget about planning anything! It takes 10 years and half a billion dollars to get shovels in the ground for a single commuter rail extension to Fall River!

       These guys have built three amazing, super high-tech subway lines in that same timeframe.

       What the T is doing is smacking people upside the head with reality: You want transit? Well, you better pay for it.

Julie: Are they going to kick people out of their houses to “get it done?”

Me:    Honestly, I’m not sure. Its almost all underground and I’ve seen them tunnelling underneath neighborhoods seemingly without disturbing anything topside… But I would imagine that they would be dislocating SOME people… But this is not my point. These subway lines are seen by everybody as vital to the city’s economic expansion/survival. They are admired, seen as a source of civic pride and are well-used. (Holy crap are they well-used!)

       We don’t place the same importance on our transit systems. There’s little public recognition that they can be the arteries through which the lifeblood of a local economy flow.

       That is, until the T releases a list of what they will lose unless they change their thinking.

Julie: I hear ya.

       And I agree 100%

       But I hesitate to take cues from a country that is willing to make its people homeless to build an Olympic village

Me:    And I agree with YOU 100%.

       But I hesitate to disregard their accomplishments just because I disagree with their methods.

Julie: True enough

Me:    Its one of the things that I am constantly bombarded with while here.

And such is the story of a lot of things that I have seen here. I have had this conversation with friends -Western and Chinese- many times: Yes, this is a totalitarian regime, and yes, they do things that are not very cool, things that I am not comfortable with. At all. But they have made a number of frighteningly significant accomplishments.

Some of these include; moving 300 million people from abject, subsistence-level poverty into Western-level Middle Class in a single generation; building as many interstate-like highways as the US has in the past 60 years in just 20; building enough rail capacity to move tens of millions of people into, out of and around their mega-cities each year while we struggle to maintain a single high-speed rail corridor.

You don’t have to like them, but you sure as hell better respect them. And not only because they are our loan officers.

So I have been offline for a while now- 6 weeks, if my count is correct. I’m sorry about this, but my laptop has been out of commission, and I was working the day shift, so I didn’t have access to the web outside of the office and while I was here, I was insanely busy and/or surrounded by folks who frown upon blogging during the downtime.

At any rate, I’m back… and boy, has some stuff been happening.

First off, as I mentioned just as my laptop was dying, I got pick-pocketed. It was a huge hassle, as I lost 1,000 RMB, my MA drivers’ license and a bunch of business cards of some contacts that I had made. It was also partly my own stupid fault.

I was in a club, trying to see one of my favorite DJs, DJ Tiesto, play a set here in Beijing, when the club that I was in morphed from a cavernous, multi-tiered room with a smallish, spring-loaded dance floor into a scene out of a bad Hong Kong action flick: The place filled with posers, hookers, creepy old guys (both Chinese & Western), coeds, frat guys & fashionistas.

Basically, all of the folks that I can’t stand and always take pains to avoid when I go out.

What’s worse, the smallish dance floor that was big enough for 200 changed into a dangerously overcrowded rub-up-against-me floor with at least twice that on it. Dancing was simply out of the question. (NOTE: This club has a capacity of 1,500 and they only had a small dance floor. Idiots.)

Pissed that I would not be able to enjoy the show that I had paid too much to see, I stormed out of there, literally fighting my way through the dense crowd. When I got to the coat check, I was stunned to realize that in a venue built for 1,500, their coat check was a 2-person-wide alcove with two frazzled Chinese ladies trying to take care of everybody. The result was a huge mass of people crushing forward, making the area worse than the dance floor that I had just retreated from.

Somewhere in all of this mess my wallet got lifted out of my pocket.

As you can imagine, this was not a good night for me. However, I did learn a valuable lesson: Do NOT go to Wanna-be-LA clubs, no matter who is making an appearance. Suffering through that scene is simply not worth the trouble.

Oh, and get myself a money clip.

So I’ve had my say. Valentine’s Day sucks. But what to the Chinese think of this trite, American, invented “holiday?” As it turns out, they kind of love it. My fiend Leena did some walking around Beijing to see what the atmosphere was like. Here is what she found:

If you walk through the shopping streets of Beijing these days you can see it, hear it, smell it everywhere…LOVE IS IN THE AIR!

After a long, cold, hard winter spring is coming ever closer. Every day it seems that it is getting a little warmer and warmer. Soon the grass and trees are going to be green again!

In Beijing’s wonderful parks slowly, slowly you will be able to see how the blossoms grow and eventually bloom, showing the colors in full glory!

When love is in the air, you tend to think this way.

We Westerns get caught up in this American “holiday for love,” but what do the Chinese think about it? Do they celebrate this special day? What do they do? So many questions…so I went to ask some Chinese friends of mine but after taking just a few steps out of my house I could see it everywhere. Almost every store in Beijing was running a sale, especially in the big shopping malls where you can find all of the standards on display: heart shaped chocolates, heart shaped soaps, heart shaped everything. Some stores go so far as to sell special edition shoes or sweaters for the holiday. (Complete with little pink hearts, of course!) I even saw a packet of two t-shirts that fit together, one for the girl and one for the boy!

So it’s a big shopping day, like Lunar New Year (Spring Festival). But is the holiday really accepted by the  ??? (”Bendiren” or “the locals”)? When I finally did meet with my friends, I asked them and they said that Beijingers really seem  to like the holiday, especially the young people.  Some friends of mine even sent me “happy Valentine’s” texts on my cell. That never happened to me in Germany!

Like in the West, couples have dinner together, buy small presents for each other or sometimes even bigger presents to demonstrate their feelings. Some make really personal gifts, for example I saw a girl printing a picture of herself and her boyfriend on a cup. Others dot eh typical thing and buy flowers. You could find the flower merchants next to every subway station at every hour, from early morning ’till  freezing midnight. Next to my apartment there was a new, temporary flower shop opened!

I can remember a beautiful scene during evening of the Valentine’s Day: I was riding the subway, a young couple was sitting in front of me and it was so cute to hear the boy telling the girl how much he loves her. When he saw me watching he told her about his love again, but this time he tried to do it in English. I had a big smile on my face as I walked out of the subway.

I love these small moments when you can see the love between two people on a special day.

And as a friend of mine told me, for many Chinese the middle of February is a very relaxing and good time because it comes so quickly after the celebrations of the Chinese New Year. Work is only slowly getting back to normal and many Chinese still don’t have much work to do so they can enjoy the Valentine’s Day.

And the best part for the Chinese is that they get TWO Valentine’s Days. The first is the western one, on February 14. The second, called The Daughter’s Festival,  falls on the 7^th day of the 7^th lunar month in the Chinese calendar (this year: August 26, 2009).

I didn’t always hate Valentine’s Day. For most of my life I was ambivalent towards it. I didn’t particularly like it, but I didn’t have the kind of active loathing that I do now. Heck, for a few years in college I even enjoyed it.

No more.

My old employer, Circles, is a servicing company for rich folks. They run errands, get stuff delivered, buy tickets, etc. As you might imagine, Valentine’s Day is a huge day for them, In fact, it is the biggest day of the year. And my job was to deal with problems in service. Logic follows that this would be my biggest day of the year.

It was. Oh, God it was.

I would work 3-4 days of overtime, listening to spoiled rich people whine and complain about how something went wrong. All the while, I’m thinking to myself: Why is this one random day of the year do damn important? I mean, people would be freaking out that the flowers didn’t arrive just so, or that they arrived at 5:30pm instead of 3:00pm. It was as if their relationships depended on something happening on this particular date.

WTF?

How about showing your significant other that you care about them every day? If that’s not good enough for them -if their level of affection can be effected by something being purchased on this date above all others- then maybe there’s something lacking in the relationship that flowers on February 14 really can’t address.

And it was almost always men buying stuff. What? If you’re a guy, you’ve got to shell out, but if you’re a woman you don’t? Oh sure, maybe you slip on something a little naughty and throw your legs up in the air for your man, but otherwise the woman expects to be wined and dined and fawned over on this day. Why isn’t she expecting it every other day? And why isn’t she buying stuff for her man?

I heard about this new fakey holiday in March for men, called Steak & B.J. Day. I like the attitude, but it really just reinforces Valentine’s Day instead of fighting it. It’s a big “F.U.” to the idea of the man having to do something and women not having to do anything at all. You get your day, now give us ours.

Frankly, I’d prefer no day at all for anybody.

In recognition of all of the years that I had to spend working endless hours of overtime at my old job dealing with all of the bullshit, I had planned to do absolutely nothing this year. I would sleep late, stay in, watch hours and hours of TV and NOT go out. Unfortunately, the calendar worked against me. Since the 14^th fell on a Saturday, my friends & I decided to go out for pizza and dancing.

We had an awesome time and I actually forgot that it was Valentine’s Day. I saw a great DJ from Germany, Bloody Mary, and danced until 6:00am.

Who needs flowers & chocolates when you have friends like these, right?

Next year Valentine’s Day falls on a Sunday. I’ll be the one doing nothing. If you’re thinking about dating me, consider this fair warning.

Sorry for the delay in posting this week. I had some problems with my laptop (where all of my posts are written and all of my photos live). Valentine’s Day will be covered exhaustively, as will my first victimization at the hands of petty criminals this weekend.

Its all coming very shortly.

My mom pointed out that I haven’t posted anything in this blog yet about how the current world-wide economic mega meltdown is effecting life here in China. I checked, and it turns out that she’s right. So here you go…

I’m certainly not qualified to comment on most macro economic trends, but I can tell you what’s been happening on the streets of the parts of Beijing that I am becoming more and more familiar with every day.

First off, the economy here is still growing. The Chinese themselves said that last quarter saw 6.5% growth, while most international analysts say that “objective” measurements put that figure closer to 1-1.5%. Either way you slice it, China isn’t in a recession making the effects in areas with large growth -like mega cities with massive foreign investments- limited. Also, I’m plugged into the expat scene where everybody is a student and/or has a good-paying job.

That being said, there are small, subtle changes that I have noticed here. While mega construction projects continue to go on (there are 3 HUGE such projects within a 10-minute walk from my home alone), they seemed to have slowed slightly. I have definitely noticed that fewer migrant workers clog the worksites. Cutbacks, perhaps?

Also, I recently met the owner of a chain of very successful restaurants here and he said that even he has seen his business decline by 30% in the past month or two. Also, a few clubs in the expat district of Sanlitun -one of which just opened last spring to great fanfare- closed abruptly last month.

Since the economy isn’t actually shrinking, you can probably attribute a lot of that to the same consumer psychology of not-spending-because-you’re-freaked-out that has put the US retail sector into a tailspin. The Chinese were first out of the gate last fall with their $500 billion stimulus package and they certainly have the resources for more, but because of their lack of social safety nests for the people (i.e. Social Security, Medicare, etc.), Chinese people tend to save upwards of 70-80% of their income rather than spend it on stuff like big TVs, nights out at nice restaurants and the like.

This means that there is enormous opportunity for the Chinese economy to rebound -and even expand- quickly if the people here start spending. On the other hand, it means that any more pulling back on spending portends real trouble.

I even heard of a few layoffs! They were people who were working for an American company in the financial industry that had just made their first moves into the Chinese market before the winter, but still… Jobs can be had if you want to do any of the “traditional” expat work, like teaching English or editing, but it feels like some of the intensity has gone out of the growth that is happening all around us.

My job “forces” me to read tons of information about businesses based in China and we are just at the start of earnings season. I’ll probably have a much better handle on the “big picture” across various industries after the next month or so. I’ll be sure to check back in then and let you know what it looks like out there.

So I’ve joined the Twitterverse. It started as just a seemingly silly way to waste a little bit of time and maybe see some funny posts by friends. But this week’s “Towering Inferno” fire at the CCTV complex here in Beijing sold me on the power of the medium. Before CNN had any details, and a full 20 minutes before the Chinese media were carrying info, Twitter was alight with updates from people on the scene. Links to photos and video were abound and I had more info at my fingertips than I knew what to do with.

So now I’m a devotee. And as such, in addition to sometimes banal updates on people’s lives, I’m now getting lots of interesting web links sent my way. When I see some really cool ones, I’ll pass them along here.

Oh, and by the by, if you want to follow my tweets, just head here.

“Don’t You Know Who I Am?!” – A great snapshot piece about the idiot expats that I sometimes see out and about at night. I really don’t like these guys.

“Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me” – My friend Sarah sent along this great link to a time-lapse photo of the Hong Kong skyline. Use your mouse and put the cursor at the top of the photo and then drag it to the bottom. Its freakin’ spectacular. I love Hong Kong.

“Don’t Look Down” – Dmitri noted that the Boston Globe today had a wonderful, fun animated graphic on how potholes are formed and repaired. I loved this.

“Don’t Hate Me Because I’m Beautiful” – My good buddy Alain is back on the internets blogging away. Its SFW (so far!). I’ll have a permanent link for him on my Friends page shortly.

As deliriously happy as I am here in China, there are some days when I really, really miss being back in America. I mean, every day I miss my friends and my little brother Nick (Hi, Nick!!), but sometimes I feel a little bit lost without all of the familiar sounds, smells and tastes of home.

Last Monday was one of those days. (NOTE: Click on any of the photos below to jump to my complete album on Flickr. You can see more pictures, get additional details and download full-sized versions of the photos.)

I have always loved Super Bowl Sunday. It is my favorite winter holiday. Almost all of my friends leave town during Thanksgiving and Christmas so its always a quiet time for me. But then the Super Bowl would come around and I would get a big get-together with everybody. For many of the past 10 years I had hosted a party at my house, but two years ago I moved and my friends Keith & Diane graciously let friends invade their space. The best part of the event (besides seeing all of my friends) was the food. Bryan & I would plan a menu based on regional specialties of each team in the game, plus the city that the game was held in. For example, back in 2004 The Patriots played the Carolina Panthers in Houston. Folks brought chips and dip (Keith & Diane’s layered dip is always freakin’ awesome), but Bry & I whipped up some homemade New England Clam Chowder (Patriots) and some Carolina-style barbeque ribs (Panthers), while Joe made a batch of Texas Firehouse Chili (Houston).

This year, I had to make do with a Western-style bar and I had much more standard fare, from a limited menu, to choose from.

Don’t get me wrong; the place that I went to, Paddy O’Shea’s, is a nice venue. Its all decked-out in European sports regalia (i.e. football stuff), but its definitely not the living room & sitting room of my old house, where I could squeeze in 25 people comfortably and set up 2 large TVs with a buffet in an adjoining room & in the kitchen.

Plus, the menu was limited and uninspired. It wasn’t bad, just… well, after a decade of themed dishes with lots of variety and new things to try, getting to choose between an individual pizza and potato skins is a little bit of a letdown, ya know?

But all of this is no fault of the venue. I was going through some adjustment based on my still-new living situation and once the game started, all of that stuff faded into the background. Hell, even the presence of 4 CouchSurfers who had never watched a game of football in their lives and who needed the occasional rule explained to them didn’t detract from my enjoyment of the game. Like Election Night and Inauguration Day, Super Bowl Sunday helped me feel insanely American. There were lots of other Americans in the bar, too.

Some were crazy.

Some were heartbroken

Some were ecstatic.

It was awesome to just be with a bunch of my countrymen/women enjoying a uniquely American event together and the presence of non-American friends only enhanced the feeling. To top it all off, the game was a thriller.

Like with Christmas, I’m going to have to start making some new traditions of my own. Losing the old habits are painful, but the thrill of starting something new seems to make up for it… Mostly.

The great John Updike passed away this week. He was, as many obituaries will undoubtedly attest, a literary giant. He was also one of those rare individuals who could bridge the gap between wildly different life passions: Literature and Baseball.

And he did it with just a single essay.

The first book about sports that I ever purchased was called “The Red Sox Reader.” (My first stolen sports book was an original edition “Curse of the Bambino” that I had borrowed from my good friend Ryan. After I got it signed by the author, I couldn’t give it back. I did buy him a replacement later edition, also signed, however.) It was a used book, printed sometime back in the 1980s. It is filled with essays about the Red Sox and Fenway Park by famous writers, but the reason that I bought it was that it noted, right there on the cover, that it contained within its pages John Updike’s classic piece from the New Yorker, “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu.”

I’ll never claim to be a big fan of “Literature,” but I guess that, like art, I know what I like. And I really liked his essay. In fact, it’s the only one that I remember from that book.

I’ve often told people that if you want to understand why I love the game of Baseball, just watch Field of Dreams. It’s the best depiction of how I feel that I’ve ever come across. Updike’s essay is a very, very close second and his words are, without d doubt, the finest conveyance of what it is like for me every time I walk into Fenway Park itself.

So go ahead and give Mr. Updike’s piece a read. Even 48 years later it still resonates. When you’re done, take a look at Bob Ryan’s remembrance of that piece from last September. It lays out many more superlatives in a manner much greater than I could ever hope to.

See you later, John.

This week the Chinese celebrate the Lunar New Year, or, as they more commonly call it, the Spring Festival. Sunday night was the start of it all, New Year’s Eve, and I was lucky enough to not only be here for it, but to experience it in the heart of ancient Beijing with a group of Chinese and foreigners who were all transfixed and moved by the sheer spectacle that the people of this great city put on. (NOTE: Click on any of the photos below to jump to my complete photo album on Flickr for lots more pictures and details on what went down. You can also see additional videos that I shot on my YouTube page.)

5 months of living here immersed in the sometimes vast cultural differences that separate us has shown me that -from a Westerner’s perspective at least- the Chinese people can be crazy, but nothing could have prepared me for this.

Its Tuesday afternoon as I write this and the sounds of explosions are still ringing n my ears. Its not because of any permanent ear damage sustained from the insane barrage of fireworks that I was smack dab in the middle of on New Year’s Eve two days ago. No, the sounds of explosions still fill my ears because over the past 48 hours, the fireworks have never stopped.

Oh, there have been a few hours each night -around 3 or 4 AM- when things slow down enough so that you get some meaningful chunks of time between explosions in some parts of the city, but for all intents and purposes for every square mile or so of real estate, there is always somebody setting off strings of firecrackers, M-40s or large rockets that explode with a deafening BOOM so loud that they set of car alarms for blocks.

Sometimes I feel like I’ve been transported to southern Israel or the Gaza Strip.

I’m really not exaggerating. As I’ve walked out of my apartment the past two nights and slipped through the mini-canyon of buildings out onto the main street, it has felt like I was in the middle of Hamas rocket and artillery attacks. Here is a text exchange that I had with my best friend Bry as I lay in bed on Sunday morning, trying to catch a few minutes sleep in between the clusters of explosions:

ME: Its like I’ve moved from Beijing to Beirut! WTF is up with all of the fireworks?!?

BRY: The Chinese invented fireworks.

ME: Yeah, but do they hafta keep rubbing our noses in it?

BRY: We invented democracy and we keep rubbing everyone’s noses in that.

ME: Yes but that doesn’t wake you u up from a sound sleep & make u look 4 the closest foxhole.

BRY: It depends on how much they hate democracy.

All complaining aside, the tradition of setting off loud firecrackers and fireworks is an ancient practice dating back to the days when the people believed that setting of large explosions with the “magic black powder” could scare away evil spirits. Frankly, I think that there is a point when you stop scaring the evil spirits and you just start annoying the hell out of them, but that is neither here nor there. What matters is that for a week or so, the Chinese people are given tacit approval by the government to set off as many explosions as they want in densely-populated areas at all hours of the day or night.

Hell, in the days leading up to the festival, makeshift fireworks stores start appearing on street corners all around the city selling normally-illegal rockets and such.

I’ve often noted in this space that for all of the cultural differences that separate the Chinese and the West, people are, at the most basic level, the same the whole world over. During New Year’s, amidst all of the cacophony, I was hit over the head with this truth again: No matter where you are in the world people will always enjoy blowing shit up.

A few days before war seemed to break out in the streets I had trekked through the Gulou hutongs on the edge of Hou Hai Lake. I’ve mentioned the area before in this space and I’ve returned several times since that first visit. There’s no “official” New Year’s Eve programming like we see back in the States. There’s no First Night and no government-run fireworks display to wrap things up. Everybody’s on their own, so I set out to find a fun space where myself and a large group of Chinese and expats could celebrate in style and get a “real” Chinese experience.

Where better than in the center of old Beijing, right?

Frankly, I was taking a wild guess based only on some snippets of accounts of past experiences of other people that I had glimpsed online, but it turned out to be the BEST place we could have gone and gave me an experience that I’ll never forget.

We started off with dinner at a hot pot restaurant on the edge of the hutong. I had originally made reservations for 30 -which I had thought would be too many- but we ended up with 38, and that was after 15 people or so backed out because we were afraid that we would have been turned away with so many over our reservation size.

In the end we all got seated and we ate a really, really good meal. Heaping plates of meat, veggies and tofu were brought out one after another and we didn’t stop until everybody had had their fill. Tack on several large bottles of beer per table and you had the makings of a raucous good time. And the best part? The final bill ended up being just 34 RMB ($5.00) EACH!!!

Damn, I love China.

After this it was off to the Drum & Bell Café. It’s a small place (I had called it “cozy” in my e-mail to folks inviting them out and I’m sticking with that) that sits right under the Bell Tower and has a roof deck, giving us an unbeatable view of the miles of hutongs surrounding us in every direction.

Again, the low cost of living in China was our friend, as the creatively-named drink menu was priced at 10 RMB ($1.50) for shots and just 15 RMB ($2.00) for bottles of Tsingdao beer. Awesome. 

Here the size of the venue actually worked in our favor. When we strolled in with 38 people (with another 10 on their way), we immediately took over the place and had ourselves a virtually-private party. Everywhere you looked in the 2 main rooms and on the roof there were CouchSurfers.

But the biggest thrill was yet to come. During the night everybody had been going up to the roof to catch glimpses of the sporadic fireworks being shot off by people in the surrounding neighborhoods…

…And to see the folks down in the square below us set off firecrackers and rockets of their own.

 

Sitting in the shadow of the towers, on a clear, cold, still night it was more than a little eerie and surreal. In a good way. This is such a timeless tradition -at more than 4,000 years old, its way older than anything that we have in the West- that you could really imagine that it was the time before… well, anything that I can think of.

What came at midnight, though, completely blew me away. And I mean that in the most literal sense.

 

It was like we had front-row seats for the end of the world.

 

I found out later that the fireworks that went off in Beijing that night were the largest uncoordinated display of aerial explosives on Earth. And we were, for all intents and purposes, smack in the middle of it. I highly recommend that you check out some professional video footage of the event from The Guradian, here.

Everybody that I was able to grab a hold of on that roof was amazed at the sight. Not one was blasé or indifferent. It was not only the most spectacular fireworks display that I had ever seen, but it was all the more amazing because it was an organic thing. Nobody used computers to map out the display based on how good it would look on TV. There was no musical accompaniment. This was just a couple of million people all deciding to set off their year-long stash of fireworks at the same time.

Incredible.

After a while of this, even the most awed people’s feet start to freeze in the 10 degree air, so it was back downstairs to warm up, have one more drink and prepare for our 30-minute walk from one end of Hou Hai. (The subway did not run all night and you try hailing a cab on New Year’s Eve.) It was cold and tiring, but at least we got to see fireworks going off all around us along the way.

This was the most un-fun part of the night, but after it was over, 20 of our band had made the trek to Club Obiwan and we proceeded to dance the rest of the night away 80s style!

I hit a wall around 3:30am and headed home. (I know. Lame, right?) I wish that the night could’ve gone on but this old body has its limits, especially since I had spent the 30 hours prior to going out in bed trying to get over a new cold that Tibby gave to me. (Thanks, honey!)  But if you didn’t get the impression from all of what I said above, I had one of the best times of my life with an amazing group of people.

For all of those back in the US reading, I’ll give you a piece of advice: Put “Visit Beijing During the Lunar New Year” on your List of Things To Do Before You Die. You’ll thank me.