Beijing in Spring: Purim, Blossoms, Lanterns, and so much more in Beijing in March and April

Hi Everyone,

Welcome back to my Astronomer in Beijing blog. I hope this post finds you all doing well. For those of you in the US, I hope you enjoyed the Solar Eclipse! All of the photos I saw looked amazing and I’m definitely a bit envious – I’m already planning to try to make the 2026 solar eclipse that goes through Spain. For those of you who celebrate Passover, I hope you all have a lovely Seder on Monday night! Here in Beijing, I’ll be co-leading Kehillat Beijing’s Community Seder, but more on that next time. As spring arrives in Beijing, it’s really starting to hit me that I’ll be leaving Beijing in approximately 2 months (I really need to start looking at flights). I’m slowly starting to pack up my apartment and I’m making a list of things I’d like to do before I leave Beijing. It’s definitely bittersweet and I wish I had a bit more time (but I think I’d feel a blue regardless). However, that hasn’t prevented me from doing some fun things in the interim, including a visit to a traditional Chinese mansion and an amazing lantern display. I hope you enjoy reading about everything and seeing all of the photos!

Purim in Beijing!

Although Passover is just around the corner, since my last post, we celebrated Purim in Beijing. For those of your unfamiliar with it, Purim is a festival where Jews recount the story of Esther who helped prevent the destruction of the Jewish people by the evil Haman. Here in Beijing, we celebrate by doing a Purim Shpiel (ok, this is pretty traditional), but unlike most Purim Shpiels, Ted really works to add a bit more humor. This year, we had a full-on Simpson’s themed Purim Shpiel. Because everything came together a bit close to Purim, we did it as more of a table read/performance rather than a play and had about half of the 40 people who came to our Purim Shabbat take part. I got to play “Ho-Mordechai” (e.g., the Homer Simpson Mordechai fusion) and it was a lot of fun (my friend Richard even joined us as he’d been to our Purim Shpiel play a few years ago and really enjoyed it). Ted added in tons of Simpsons references and we all had a great time! Additionally, we had a delicious Purim potluck with lots of hamentaschen (the traditional triangle shaped Purim cookie), too (see the photos in the Jewish life in Beijing section)!

Later in the weekend, I continued celebrating Purim at Chabad’s Purim party! While I unfortunately missed the Megillah reading (I mis-timed how long it would take to get to Chabad via the subway), I did enjoy some delicious Purim treats and it was nice to see friends and celebrate.

Additionally, one of the Purim traditions is to give gift baskets to friends and family. I got a lovely Purim basket from Chabad as a gift from Roberta and Ted (I now have a very nice Havdallah set). Also, with our friends at Kehilat Shanghai, Kehillat Beijing did a combined Purim basket exchange with members of the community. We had a number of people from Beijing and Shanghai join and I made a nice Purim basket for my friend Sam and I got some lovely Purim goodies from one of my brother’s friends, Bec!

Prince Kung’s Mansion

As the weather has really started to warm up, I’ve been trying to do a few things on my Beijing wish list that I haven’t done in my 2+ years here. One of them is to visit Prince Kung/Prince Gong’s Mansion (there is some debate about the name of the prince). The Mansion itself is the palatial estate of a former prince in the 1700s/1800s, much like Yonghegong, the Lama Temple was before it became a Tibetan Buddhist temple. Aesthetically, the estate looks like a scaled down version of the Forbidden City, with many a dragon motif around the palace. However, unlike the Forbidden City, you can still find quite a bit of Buddhist influence in the architecture and the decoration. Additionally, while the Forbidden City can sometimes feel like a triumph of human architecture over nature (although maybe it’s more lush in the summer? – I’ll find out when my parents visit), there were tons of blooming trees in the home portion.

One of my favorite portions of the Mansion is that you can see inside some of the rooms! While I’ve seen paintings and photographs of traditional Chinese homes, this was really cool and a bit more reminiscent of visiting European estates where you can get a better sense of how people lived. The only downside is that outside of the rooms, they also transformed large reception halls into museum displays, but unlike some of the other places I’ve visited, everything was in Mandarin. While a lot of the displays were beautiful, I definitely missed a bit of the historical context.

However, the best part of the Mansion is the gardens! I’m so glad I waited until Spring! The back half of the estate features a lavish Chinese garden with a large pond (complete with a small temple in the middle of a small lake, which requires a boat to get to it, a goldfish pond, and a miniature rock mountain. It’s really quite beautiful. You can also see a small Buddhist site (the red flags), as well as a cool European style gate in the style of the Old Summer Palace and a miniature “Great Wall” gate.

If you look closely, you might’ve notice a few bat motifs throughout the garden. That’s because bats are apparently a symbol of good luck in China (I’d never heard this before)! You can see Bat windows, bat carvings, bat light fixtures, and even the bond is bat shaped! However, the highlight is a “Batcave!” While there isn’t a Batmobile in the Batcave, there is a carving of “Fu” – meaning prosperity and luck – carved by the Kangxi Emperor. One of the cool things that I discovered is that my apartment even has a Bat motif in it (see the last photo of this block). I’ve had this carving in my kitchen, but never noticed the bats until now!

Additionally, at the Mansion, they had a number of fun anime-esque mascots for kids that I had to take photos of! And, I finally found fortune cookies (fortune cookies are actual a Chinese-American inventions)!

When I was walking to Prince Kung’s mansion, I wandered by this cute traditional style hutong house that I had to pop into. Since I live in a more modern hutong, it was really interesting to see what they used to look like and get a sense of 18th century Beijing life!

Mega Lights Wonderland

While many of the fun excursions I’ve gone on have been to visit traditional sites here in Beijing, one of my great envies from my brother’s time in Shanghai was that he always got to see the amazing lantern displays at the Yu Gardens and I haven’t gotten to see similar ones in Beijing. Well, this all changed last weekend, when Richard, Tom, Pablo, Daniele, David (a new visiting grad student from Oxford), and I (and some of Daniele’s and Pablo’s friends) went to the Mega Lights Wonderland park here in Beijing! This was a full on artistic lantern tour-de-force with hundreds, if not thousands, of lanterns set up around the park to transport you out of Beijing. Although the park opens at 4pm, we knew we wanted to get there at sunset as the lanterns really come alive at night. I’ll let the lanterns speak for themselves for the most part, but just looks at these massive displays (most of which towered over me). It’s really amazing. The first set of displays appeared to be all mythical creatures and animals, highlighted by the giant fairy princess.

After that, was the highlight for this crew of Astronomers, the giant Astronaut and sea of planets! This was so cool! We had to take a group selfie! And I love the way the lights reflect off the lake! And also, look at the cute little spacemen!

After this, we had some cool Pokemon-esque characters including a giant white tiger, an awesome panda, and a Robot DJ!

We then left the land of science fiction to go to the pre-historic era surrounded by magnificent dinosaurs, flowers, and mushrooms!

After a brief foray into a candy display, we saw a magnificent display of ocean life!

We then moved onto some cool anime/video game inspired characters (I couldn’t figure out if these are from a specific video game, but if you recognize the characters, let me know!) These were some of my favorites!

We then moved onto the more traditional Chinese portion of the park, featuring dragon lanterns (like the one at Shichahai), Buddhist-esque New Years displays (lots of good luck fish), and Beijing Opera masks (the one I took the selfie with is for Son Wukong, the Monkey King, who inspired Akira Toriyama to create Goku)!

Lastly, we walked through the Chinese Zodiac and then found an amazing hot air balloon sized lantern lantern, a large Miyazaki-esque city displays, and even more dragons, phoenixes, and pandas!

I hope you all liked seeing the Mega Lights Wonderland. I think the name definitely did it justice. I have to say that the entire time I was there, I couldn’t help but think how much my grandfather, Bompa, my Mom’s Dad, would have loved this. He always loved taking photos of flowers and I can imagine him walking around with a camera capturing some pretty unique photos!

Beijing in Bloom!

With spring fully in swing in Beijing, I find myself taking lots of photos of flowers and budding trees! Hopefully wherever you are, you’re also enjoying the start of spring, but if the trees are still a little barren, enjoy Beijing in spring time (just without the sandstorms – though we didn’t have any crazy sandstorms this year).

Astronomy Update: Life at Tsinghua

As I expect my last two months to be, this was a busy month on the Astronomy front. Partially, this was due to needing to spend some time filling out various forms for Padova so I can get officially hired (thank you Daniele for help with the ones that were in Italian!) and partly because I’m trying to at least wrap up Project Morphology (and have it drafted to send to co-authors by June). I’m making good headway on Project Morphology. I’ve added an additional color analysis to further explore one of the three protoclusters in our sample and I like the results I’m seeing. However, I’m stuck on a bug where the magnitudes (the brightness of the galaxies) seems to be giving me a problem when I measure them (I use two different programs, one to study color and the other to look at the shape – both give estimates of the magnitudes that should agree and they currently don’t). I’m working with some collaborators to troubleshoot it and hopefully will have a solution soon. In terms of Project Low-Z, since that isn’t directly being done with anyone else at Tsinghua, I’m slowly finishing that up (the plan is to finish it up once I arrive in Padova, especially as many people will be away on vacation in July and August). Outside of these two projects, I also spent some time working on spectral classification for the C3VO protocluster survey that I’m part of. It’s been really cool to get a better sense of spectroscopy for early universe galaxies, especially as I’ve primarily worked with photometry. Furthermore, I’ve been working with one of my fellow Tsinghua postdocs (Hongming Tang) to analyze a sample of radio AGNs that he’s working on, and it’s nice to collaborate! Also, one of Pablo’s friends at Peking University raised the possibility of some of us giving talks at Peking University, which is something I’ll try to do before I go! While not related to my research, we also had a lunch talk by a visiting graduate student from Oxford, David Simon, who did his undergrad at BU! He graduated in 2020, and was in the Physics departments, but it was fun to chat about Boston! David’s going to be in Beijing through June, so it’s nice to have another person join our foreigner cohort!

While not directly Tsinghua related, I also had to renew my Chinese visa so that I can stay until late June (it originally expired April 30). While this is my third time renewing my visa, this was the most unusual one as I received a call a few days after going to the visa office asking me to confirm that I have a twin brother. When I obviously said yes, I was told I needed to bring our birth certificates (a thing that nobody has given me a good reason for). Thankfully my Dad was able to get them from the safe deposit box and send a photo (because I was NOT going to stick that in the mail). It all worked out in the end, but definitely a bit of a hassle and still nobody gave me a straight answer as to why they needed them. On a more positive side, I was also interviewed by the International Scholars office about what Tsinghua could do better for foreign scholars. While I won’t be here to see if any of the suggestions I made will be implemented, hopefully this is a sign of good things to come!

While not related to my science, I did get to wander around campus a bit and it looks really pretty, so I hope you enjoy that!

And I also got to see the outside of Peking University for the first time – it’s on the other side of Tsinghua’s campus and somehow I never walked by (hopefully, I’ll make it on campus before I leave Beijing, too!).

Jewish Life in Beijing

While Purim and Passover preparations (I’m co-leading the Seder with my friends Kevin and Sam) took up a lot of my Jewish life this month, we also had five amazing Shabbat dinners (including Purim). Ted was back with themed Shabbat dinners in full force and he really outdid himself (in terms of both food and food puns – read the name tags!). In the last five weeks, we had a Purim Shabbat, an In the Big-Inning (Opening Day in MLB) Shabbat, Spring is Here Shabbat, a Hodge Podge Shabbat, and a Peace on Earth Day Shabbat! Because I got into a rhythm of making things for Shabbat when we did the potlucks, I’ve been brining lots of cookies to share for the last few weeks (I made chocolate brownie cookies, peanut butter chocolate cookies, and apple pie cookies – all very popular!). I really love this community and will definitely miss having such a warm, welcoming Jewish home in Beijing. I’m so thankful to Roberta and Ted for opening their home every week and inviting me to be part of this vibrant community.

Goldie!!!

Goldie continues to be a bundle of joy. While she’s starting to get a bit suspicious that things are changing in my apartment (she’s noticed boxes and suitcases moving and books disappearing), she’s still enjoying a good burrowing, even in the warm weather! While she doesn’t love when I have the fan on in my bedroom, she does love finding a good place to snuggle, especially when I had the water filter repairman came to fix my water filter.

Although Goldie spends a lot of time under the covers, she also loves to nap on the couch while I’m working in my living room (hopefully my new apartment will have a good napping set up for her, too!). She also really likes to watch as I lift weights in the morning, too! She’s so adorable and definitely doesn’t like it when I spend too much time staring at my computer.

Additionally, Goldie’s enjoyed exploring her box and trying out her new cat carrier. While I haven’t tried zipping her in it yet (I’m sure she’ll hate that), she has enjoyed curling up in it! She also really likes that when I pack, she can jump into the suitcases and play around! Hopefully she’ll enjoy my unpacking as much as my packing!

This month also brought a visitor to our door! As you can see one of the neighborhood cats was scavenging in my outside stairwell and Goldie was very interested! She wasn’t hissing or moaning, but it seemed like she was trying to get this cats attention. This cat has sat on the skylight a lot, so it’s a regular, but I haven’t seen it so close since I’ve had Goldie. I do wish I could have fed the other cat, as it looked hungry, but the second it noticed me in the window, it seemed a bit startled and ran away. Still, I’m glad that Goldie can make some friends since she’s a solo cat.

Exploring Shichahai: Houhai, Qianhai, and, for the first time, Xihai

Although the Mega Lights Wonderland was AMAZING, I’m still partial to the amazing Shichahai Dragon that’s been up for Lunar New Year (I’m really hoping it will still be here when my parents come in a month). As Houhai and Qianhai are two of my favorite places in Beijing, I wanted to share some more pictures of these two lakes, especially as they look so pretty in springtime.

However, over the Tomb Sweeping Holiday, I re-discovered that there is a third lake (you have to cross a street, so it’s a bit hidden) called Xihai that connects to the Shichahai lakes! Since I was working from home and trying not to spend the entire day moving between working at my table and on my couch, I decided to go for a walk around Xihai! I’m really glad I did! Not only is it equally beautiful, but it’s a bit quieter, and I found a cool little memorial to Guo Shuojing, a famous Chinese Astronomer (the Astronomy conference I went to last spring was named after him) who is also responsible for creating the Shichahai system of lakes for water travel in Beijing (none of these are natural lakes, they are connected via a series of locks – you can see them in the photo block below). It was really cool to learn a new bit of Beijing history, especially one that hits so close to my actual home! I also wandered into a really cool art exhibit featuring a mix of Buddhist style paintings and lovely portraits of animals!

Vegan Food in Beijing

In late March, Richard, Tom, Pablo, Daniele, Josh, and I went to Ori Sake a small Sichuan style vegetarian restaurant near my apartment to celebrate my getting the postdoc in Padova! It was really nice to be together and it was a great meal! I’m definitely a big fan of Ori’s food as it’s so different from a lot of the other vegetarian food here in Beijing (I love that too!). Ori does small plates, so we got a lot and it was all delicious! We got pomelo soda, Yunnan fried tofu, yuba (tofu skins) with pickles, edamame, Sichuan fried tofu skewers, Sichuan dumplings, peanut noodles, a small hot pot, mapo tofu, veggie balls, bamboo with toon & cashews, cabbage with a red pepper sauce, and eggplant rolls! It was amazing!

Also in late March, I joined the Vegans of Beijing for an amazing hot pot dinner at the Tibetan Tea Vegan Hotpot restaurant as part of the Meatless March Event. For those of you unfamiliar, hot pot is a traditional Chinese dish where you start with a broth and add your own veggies, tofu, noodles (and meats traditionally) to a pot of boiling broth (you don’t eat the broth like in soup). You then cook the vegetables in the broth and then add them to a sauce that you make yourself (you can see the sauce bowls on the table). You can see examples of the array of ingredients we got (lots of veggies, mushrooms, and tofu), as well as the broth! And everything was VEGAN! We had a fantastic time! I haven’t done hot pot too frequently, but it’s been a lot of fun when I have!

And then, I went to a second Vegans of Beijing dinner (also part of the Meatless March Event) at the amazing DuLi pop-up here in Beijing! It was another great group dinner and I had a lot of fun meeting some new people and enjoying some amazing food! We got a non-alcoholic fermented tea drink (kind of like kombucha), a vegan breadbasket, gongbao pizza, Sichuan Stir fry, DanDan gnocchi, tempeh curry, and vegan tiramisu! I always think of Jesse when I eat at DuLi, since the restaurant in Shanghai was near his old apartment, so it was nice to text him some familiar food photos!

Additionally, this month, I went to Tianchun Miaoxiang, the vegetarian restaurant by Tsinghua three different times with three different groups of friends! In late March, Kevin, Sam, and I met there to start discussing Passover planning. We had fried lotus root, kung pao chik’n, taro balls w/mushrooms chestnuts and walnuts, homestyle tofu, and passion fruit juice! It was a great meal and a great meeting!

And then a week later, I caught up with my friend Miriam for a lovely lunch! We got okra and mushrooms, eggplant and chickpeas, spicy Hunnan style seitan, stir fried potatoes, dragon fruit juice, and qingtuan (the green cakes served for Tomb Sweeping Day). It was really great to catch up and hear how she’s doing.

And then this past week, after trekking to the Tax Office to attempt to get our tax refunds (we’ll see if it actually works, lots of issues …), Richard, Pablo, Daniele, and I went to Tianchun Miaoxiang for a delicious lunch. We got passion fruit juice, cold “military” tofu, flame tofu (they light it on fire at the table), tofu skin rolls, taro balls with mushrooms walnuts and chestnuts, Sichuan style spicy mock fish, and sauteed Maitaake mushrooms! It was another delicious meal and certainly made up for the frustrations at the tax office!

Outside of eating out, I also did a fair amount of my own cooking. I made red lentil and potato stew, vegan dal mahkani (for Shabbat), chickpea and lentil curry, a red curry noodle soup, a red lentil chili, white bean and cauliflower chowder, chocolate brownie cookies (for Shabbat), peanut butter chocolate cookies (for Shabbat), and apple pie cookies (for Shabbat). I also got sugar covered blueberries, which were delicious!

Exploring the Rest of Beijing

Although the Lunar New Year is now over two months ago, I’m still finding a few fun dragon decorations that I wanted to share!

Beyond Lunar New Year Decorations, I also saw a ton of cool statues (and cake displays!) around Beijing that I wanted to share with you!

Additionally, I saw a woman doing an amazing flag/kite dance and some cool water calligraphy in the square between the Drum Tower and the Bell Tower.

And of course, I still saw some fun bike decorations (though the bike blankets are slowly disappearing as the temperature heats up).

Animals of Beijing

With the weather warming, my friendly neighborhood cats are out and about. As you can see by the photos, I’ve been trying to give them a snack whenever I can since I don’t know how regularly they are fed. The one in many of the top photos is always super friendly, and it’s always nice to see some cute cats (though Goldie is the cutest!). Additionally, I walked by a very cute cat cafe in Shichahai that I definitely want to check out. And of course, I saw my favorite puppies in Beijing, Mimi & Honey (Roberta & Ted’s dogs), who are always very cute! And also, check out these geese!

What am I Reading/Watching?

In terms of reading this month, I’m still working my way through Artemis by Andy Weir. I’m really enjoying it, and I hope to finish it this month. Outside of that, I also read the first two volumes of the DC Comics Tangent Comics, an Elseworlds tale of a very different DC universe! It’s a really cool reimagining and I definitely recommend it.

In terms of tv, I finished a number of shows in the last month. I finished season 7 of Bosch on Amazon Prime. This is the final season, though it spins off into a direct sequel, Bosch: Legacy, so it’s not really over. This season saw Bosch pushed to the brink dealing with injustice in the courts and protecting his daughter. While I don’t want to spoil the end, the finale was great! I really love that show! Maybe I’ll have to check out some of Michael Connelly’s novels. I also finished the third season of The Rising of the Shield Hero, an adventure anime about a hero transported to a magical world as one of the legendary cardinal heroes destined to save the world. I really liked how this season explored the moral dilemmas of the other 3 heroes and am a big fan! I also finished Constellation on Apple TV+, a very Fringe-esque science fiction show about an astronaut (played by Noomi Rapace) who is involved in an accidental death aboard the ISS. While that premise alone is intriguing, the show goes pretty hard into science fiction, playing with ideas of parallel worlds and crossing between them. I definitely recommend it! Additionally, I finished Hero Tales, an anime about a group of Chinese monks who are blessed by the stars trying to save ancient. It’s based on a manga by Hiromu Arakawa (of Fullmetal Alchemist fame), and while it’s not as good as that, it’s still a fun adventure. A few weeks ago I finished the second season of Tokyo Vice on Max! It’s a fantastic show about Jake Adelstein’s life (it’s unclear how autobiographical the show is, though the general consensus is just the loose beats) as an American reporter at a Japanese newspaper as he dives into Yakuza culture and government corruption. It stars Ansel Englort and Ken Watanabe and it works as an interesting foil to Shogun (e.g., a westerner in Japan, but in the modern day). I’ll talk more about Shogun next month, but I love how in both shows (slightly less in Tokyo Vice), Japanese people speak Japanese and there is a clear understanding of the differences of being a foreigner and the struggle that living abroad can entail. Ken Watanabe really steals the show, though, as the hard hitting detective trying to bring a Yakuza boss down in a sea of corruption. I also liked that the show expanded naturally to include and build-up more of the Japanese cast to really highlight the story of 1990s Japan and not just a foreigner’s perspective. I also finished the anime Lycoris Recoil, a fun action-adventure anime about a pair of girls who protect a modern Japan from chaos. The show works really well balancing the dynamic of the two heroines (one is bubbly and the other is super strict) and has tons of great action! Lastly, I finished Megalobox: Nomad, the sequel to the original Megalobox, which sees Joe return to the ring, but also is an insightful exploration of grief, dealing with tragedy, and how people pick themselves back up! I highly recommend it – oh, and the boxing scenes are great!

East Meets West

This month, I saw a lot of Disney figures around the city! Lots of Snow White, Mickey Mouse, Kung Fu Panda, and Sponge Bob! I also found some remnants of America in an Elvis sign, a Native American Dream Catcher, a scarecrow, and Gibson guitars!

Anime & Comics

And of course, no Astronomer in Beijing post is complete without showing all of the manga, anime, and comics paraphernalia that I saw around Beijing! Since I wandered by many a Popmart this month, you can see tons of figurines from Dragonball Z, DC Comics, Marvel, Naruto, Pokemon, and One Piece, as well as some cool stickers, posters, and Uniqlo t-shirts! I’ll definitely miss the easily available comics fandom here in China (though I am bringing a sizable collection of figurines with me to Padova). I always love wandering by a bike or a window and spotting some cool anime and comics related gear!

Additionally, during the Tomb Sweeping Day Holiday, Pablo and I (and some of his friends) stopped by Steamed Bun Comics and perused the collection! I didn’t buy anything this time, but it’s always nice to see a comic store! We also played some old school Marvel Vs Capcom and somehow my button smashing technique was successful!

As always, if you made it this far, thank you so much for enjoying my Astronomer in Beijing blog! I hope you enjoyed learning about what I was up to this month and seeing Prince Kung’s mansion and the Mega Lights Wonderland. As always, if you have any questions, comments, or concerns, please let me know! It’s always nice to hear from you, whether it be in the comments or directly via e-mail. I hope you all have a lovely rest of April and start to May! And for those of your who celebrate, I hope you have a wonderful Passover! See you next month everyone!

In Peace,

Emmet