This is Beijing-Beijing English blog

Temple fairs are popular during holiday, and museums are trying to get a piece of the action. One museum is marketing itself a science and technology temple fair.

At a science museum in Beijing, five robots are welcoming visitors with New Year’s greetings.

These robots are famous after a stint last year as envoys of the Beijing Olympic Games. After a half-year tour across the nation, they’ve returned to the capital city to perform for Spring Festival.

A visitor said, “They can stand up with only one leg. I wonder how they can do it for so long.”

What most impressed these people was the debut of training machines used by China’s national sports teams.

One seventy year-old man found out what it’s like for a professional athlete to train for yacht racing, “It’s a very good opportunity to experience this. I want to try all the machines here.”

Event organizer said, “The machine can measure your heart beating, racing distance and other data to help your train.”

These two kids are comparing their swimming skills. Without setting foot in the water, this training machine can improve arm strength crucial for top competitors.

Surrounded by these young people is a man wearing a small gadget. It’s not headphones, but a device for monitoring the wearer’s health.

Connected with a computer, it can measure your breathing rate, heart rate, and other targets quickly, displaying your level of health through a picture of a tree. The more leaves the tree has, the better your health is.

You read it right, I mean Happy “Niu” Year, not “New” Year.

About 12 hours later, the Chinese Lunar New Year is coming. The year of Ox is coming to us.

Ox is written in Chinese characters as ?, or Niu. Since the pronunciation of Niu is exactly New, and there is a trend to use Niu and New interchangeably among my friends.

So, Happy Niu Year and Happy New Year to all my readers, my friends and family!

For more information about the Chinese Zodiac, check here.

My Wishes

This blog is trying to be a bridge between the western world, and the eastern world, the two distinctly different worlds, and I am trying so hard to help people outside China to understand what is happening here, and what is in people’s mind. I hope the greeting brings the happiness and hope of the Chinese New Year to people who do not celebrate this holiday.

From today, the whole China is in a 7 day holiday – the longest holiday in China (of cause accompanied by the largest human migration in the world every year for returning to hometown). I hope my friends who are in holiday enjoy their holiday and relax, and prepare for the new year, and for my friends who don’t know the Chinese New Year to also celebrate one more holiday – that is the meaning of holiday: to have people collectively celebrate for the past accomplishment and looking forward to the better future.

I’d like the take the chance for my loyal readers who have been with me for many years (some for as long as 7 years). There are not too many 7 years in life, and daily accompany is a huge accomplishment. I would love to thank everyone who have commented on my blog. You made the blog much more meaningful than just my post, and contributed the majority of the content on this blog. Your continuous feedback, compliment, supplementary, and even challenge helped me so much to understand this world better. It is much more than what I have expected when I started this daily blog 7 years go.

Last, but not least, I would love to say thank you to my close friends and family who we live in the same physical daily world (v.s. the online world). I may devote more time online than offline sometimes these years, and spent the time I may have otherwise spent on coffee or tea time with others. Thanks especially for Yifan and Wendy’s support. They have a much less devoted father or husband than others. Thanks.

Wish everyone has a great year of Ox.

Posted by Jian Shuo Wang at January 25, 2009 12:23 PM
Copyright: You are free to redistribute this work, as long as you keep this disclaimer and this link: http://home.wangjianshuo.com/archives/20090125_happy_niu_year.htm

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The annual CCTV Spring Festival gala continued to receive overwhelming attention and affection from Chinese people, according to a survey by CTR MarketResearch Co. Ltd.

A total of 55.2 percent of the interviewed families thought the show was “very good”, and 25.9 percent rated it as “fairly good”.

The show featured major events in 2008, including relief efforts after the 8.0-earthquake in Sichuan Province, the Beijing Olympic Games and the successful spacewalk during the Shenzhou 7 mission.

Popular singers, dancers, actors and Chinese crosstalk actors presented more than four hours of performance. It also used a multi-media backdrop and sophisticated staging structure.

Today is the first day of the new year. We went to the Ditan Temple Fair today and took some pictures

The Spring Festival is the most important and the biggest traditional festival in China. Maybe you have already heard of many interesting customs about the Spring Festival, but did you know the local customs can be rather different in different areas of China. Even if some of these customs are the same, the legends are not.

For example, eating dumplings on Spring Festival Eve is the tradition in northern China, while in southern China, people eat glutinous rice cakes and spring rolls, or dumplings with egg wrappers instead of the traditional dumpling skin.

There are many reasons why people in northern China eat dumplings on Spring Festival Eve. One reason is that the shape of the dumplings resembles the ancient Chinese gold ingots used as money–Yuanbao, so dumplings symbolize wealth.

Therefore, it is said that eating dumplings on Spring Festival Eve will bring you good luck. Some families hide a coin in one of the dumplings, and the person who find or bite it will be the luckiest one in the New Year.

The other reason why people in northern China eat dumplings is according to its Chinese pronunciation “jiǎozi”. In China’s traditional timing system, after midnight, the first hour is called “zǐshí”, and this hour marks the beginning of the Lunar New Year. The pronunciation of “jiǎozi”(dumpling) is similar to “jiāo zǐ” (meaning auspicious). In general, dumplings should be made before mid-night on Spring Festival Eve, which is when the whole family get together to enjoy the hot dumplings. What a delightful picture!

An actor who is dressed as a Qing Dynasty emperor walks during a performance in Beijing January 23, 2009. The performance adapting the ancient ceremony of the Qing dynasty emperors to pray for good fortune will be held daily during the upcoming Chinese Lunar New Year celebrations in Beijing’s Temple of Heaven.

Dates:  January 26 – February 1
Venue: Chaoyang Park, Chaoyang District
Admission: 10 yuan
To get there: Bus routes 31, 302, 705, 731, 750, 752 or 852 to Chaoyang Park (Chaoyang Gongyuan).

Chaoyang Temple Fair is actually called, Chaoyang International Carnival. Another foreign-style temple fair in Beijing, the 2006 Changyang International Carnival will offer performances by renowned bands from the UK and Russia.

People can also go skiing, play games, and enjoy the food of various countries. This year’s carnival will cooperate with local charity organizations so that people will be able to contribute to society while enjoying themselves with the diverse entertainment.

Dates:  January 24 – February 1
Venue: Shijingshan Amusement Park, Shijingshan District
Admission: 5 yuan
To get there: Visitors can get to the park’s south gate by taking the subway to Bajiao Youleyuan. The park is 100 meters west of the subway station.

Starting from 2000, Shijingshan Temple fair is a foreign-style temple fair. It is almost like a foreign carnival parade. A cinema of 4-dimensional movies will open alongside other events this year.

Exotic performances such as a Japanese fan dance, a Korean long-drum dance , Latin dance, a Russian song and dance performance and a cartoon show will be seen on the fair. There will also be other amusement programs, including those for children

Dates:  January 26 – 31
Venue: Lianhuachi Park
Admission: 6 yuan
To get there: Take bus routes 323, 324, 300, 368, to Liuliqiao Beili and go north for 200 meters to reach the west gate of the park.

Located close to Beijing West Railway Station, the Lotus Pond (Lianhuachi) Park is regarded as the birthplace of the city of Beijing, bearing a history of over 3,000 years. The temple fair here is quite traditional, with more than 100 events going on to make the park an ideal place to enjoy Chinese folk arts and food.

Lianhuachi Temple Fair features a special landscape of Huaguo Mountain and Shuilian Cave, the residence of the Monkey King in Journey to the West.

Other song and dance performances, such as yangge and duets of northeast China will be performed, and Shifuxian, or poem-string, an over 200-year-old folk art on the verge of extinction will make its debut at the fair.

Dates: January 26 – 30
Venue: Daguanyuan Park, Xuanwu District
Admission: 10 yuan
To get there: Bus routes 59, 19, 819, 56, 122 or 423 to Daguanyuan.

This temple fair will be held at Grand View Park, a replica of the magnificent Daguanyuan garden of an imperial family described in the well-known Chinese novel A Dream of Red Mansions by Qing Dynasty writer Cao Xueqin (17l5-l763). Besides the traditional temple fair events, there will be shows of folk arts, extreme sports, Chinese kungfu, Kaifeng Pan Drums as well as the “Two-people show” (Er Ren Zhuan) from northeastern China.

The opera Concubine Yuan Paying a Visit Home, and Amusement in Red Mansion which was adapted from the novel A Dream of Red Mansions, will also be performed. The scenes of Baoyu Getting Married and Celebrating the Lady Dowager Jia’s Birthday will also be reenacted at the temple fair.