Ghost Town

Well, due to a bit of miscalculation on our part, it looks like we won’t be on the internet much until next week sometime.

Most of the students are away on break until March, so the campus is already incredibly quiet. Now that New Year’s is coming up (this Sunday), it’s getting even more deserted. As you can see from the photo, everybody in our campus town is already starting to close up shop and go home for an extended holiday with their families, including the guy who sells the internet cards that we need to buy to refresh our account to go online. (We pay for internet by bandwidth used, and uploading all of our vacation pix as well as catching up on the news has burned through our account pretty quickly)

We’ve got about 2 RMB left on our account, with no way to get more until the phone card guy who’s usually outside the gate comes back from the holidays. It’s enough for the occasional email check over the week, but not much else. Tomorrow, we’re going into Chengdu to stock up on Western groceries at a big box store, then going to the market to lay in some more supplies and hunker down in the apartment for the week. (Good thing we’ve got a stack of DVDs that we bought around Christmas time.)

New Year’s (also called Spring Festival) seems to be a bit of Christmas and Thanksgiving combined. From what we’ve heard, most everyone spends all of New Year’s Eve cooking tons of food, then having a huge meal right before the New Year’s TV specials come on. Traditionally, you’re not supposed to even leave the apartment, because opening the door brings in bad luck. Lots of fireworks (they’ve already started) at midnight and it used to be that people weren’t supposed to sleep all night. The next day, New Year’s Day, is when you get out your new clothes and walk around and say hi to the neighbors. The whole country is on vacation officially for 7 days.

Being a vegetarian foreigner family of five in a meat-heavy country of single-children during a holiday that’s all about family regrouping together (and being on a university campus where everyone seems to be going home far away to someplace else), we’re outside the loop for this holiday, and not invited over to anyone’s house for dinner, so things will probably be pretty low-key around here for a bit. Kind of like being Jewish during Christmas, except that all the Chinese restaurants are closed.