Yom Kippur, Sukkot, & THE GREAT WALL OF CHINA!!!!

Hi Everyone, Thank you again for reading my blog! I’m so glad that so many of you are enjoying hearing about and seeing pictures of my time in Beijing! As I teased in the last post, I hope you’re excited to see pictures of the Great Wall (like the one I took that I use as the background image for the blog). Before I dive in, I hope you’re all staying safe and healthy! And again, if you haven’t subscribed yet and are interested in getting an e-mail when I update my blog, click the button on the right.

Yom Kippur

As I mentioned last week, my arrival in Beijing was perfectly timed to align with the Jewish High Holy Days. As such, I was able to celebrate Yom Kippur with Kehillat Beijing and go to services in person. Like Rosh Hashanah, Roberta & Ted hosted services in their home (as well as lovely pre-fast and break-fast meals!). Because Yom Kippur was in the middle of the week, the crowd was definitely a bit smaller. However, it was still very nice to meet many new people. Traditionally, Kehillat Beijing has brought a Rabbi over from the US or Israel to lead services. However, because of the COVID restrictions/quarantining, they haven’t been able to do that. Like Rosh Hashanah, Roberta led the services with a lot of community interaction. For those of you in the Temple Sinai community, you might remember that I’ve done my fair share of High Holiday chanting. Because Roberta was looking for volunteers, a couple of days before Yom Kippur I looked through the Torah portions to see what I remembered. Surprisingly, I still remembered most of the 5th Aliyah, so with the help of tapes recorded by my home congregation’s rabbis (Rabbi Linda and Rabbi Jonathon – thank you so much for sending those tapes to Jesse!), I was able to re-learn the portion and chant it! It was really cool to participate in such a meaningful way in a community I just joined. It really helped to make my first Yom Kippur abroad feel special.

Visiting the Great Wall of China

Because of the timing of all of the Jewish and Chinese holidays, both Sukkot and the mid-Autumn festival coincide with a few days after Yom Kippur (both are governed by Lunar calendars). In China, the mid-Autumn festival is a celebration of the autumn full moon and a symbol of family reunion. Although this is a lovely sentiment, it was a bit bittersweet for me since I obviously wasn’t reunited with my family to celebrate. However, I did get to try a few different moon cakes, the traditional pastry for the holiday. For those of you who are unfamiliar, they’re pretty different from any western-style pastries I’ve had. There is a thin layer of dough and they are packed with various fillings. Unlike baozi that I’ve shown previously, moon cakes are pretty dense. The ones that I particularly enjoyed had a mix of nuts (it kind of tasted like haroset from Passover) and red bean paste. Traditionally they also contain a whole egg yolk, but I didn’t try any of those.

Because the mid-Autumn festival holiday is a government holiday (and people get time off from work), Roberta, Ted, and their son Ben were planning to go to their vacation home in Huairou and invited me to join. Since my only experiences in China up to this point had been in Shanghai and Beijing, I was excited to go and experience non big-city life! Although Huairou is technically in Beijing, we were about an hour from where Roberta & Ted live in Beijing (by car) and an hour and a half from my current apartment. There is a reason that people sometime refer to these cities as Megacities! These cities have governmental districts that are enormous, even if they can be divided up into a main city with smaller regional cities surrounding it. Huairou is famous for chestnuts and walnuts and as you’ll see any many of the pictures below, I got to see lots of chestnut trees (those spiky little balls are the chestnuts)! They’re pretty much everywhere and the only downside is that the husks that the chestnuts grow in are really prickly and can get stuck in your skin if you pick them up (or in a dog’s paw if they step on them).

While it was a real treat to spend three days away from the grind of city life in Beijing, the most exciting part of this trip is that Huairou is the area closest to Beijing where you can see and climb the Great Wall of China!!! I actually got to hike and walk the Great Wall twice in a span of less than 48 hours! The two trips were really different and it was cool to see a more touristy side of the Great Wall and a more secluded portion. On Monday afternoon, Roberta and I took the dogs on a hike through the chestnut orchards (see above photos) that culminated in my getting to go to the Great Wall. As the chestnut orchards feel a bit more like a mountainous forest than the apple orchards in the North East, it was really exciting to see the Great Wall start to become visible as we got closer and closer.

For this hike, we ended up at the commercial area where I was able to take a ski life up to the Great Wall. For those of you who don’t like heights, this probably isn’t the ideal method to get to the Wall. The ski lift definitely felt just a bit precarious as it carried me over the mountainous terrain to the top of the Great Wall. However, it does provide for some amazing photographs of Huairou and the Wall itself. For those of you who are wondering, that is indeed a giant slide track down the side of the mountain from the top of the Great Wall. As you can see in one of the top photos, one of the options for getting down from the top of the Wall is to drive a go-kart down the mountain. Although this looks fun, I wasn’t sure how fast the karts drove and since I didn’t have a backpack with me, was a bit concerned with the prospect of losing my phone as I flew down the track (apparently they actually move quite slowly), so I opted to take the ski lift down. For now, I’ll just have to save that as a thing to do next time I visit.

The Great Wall is magnificent! It’s really cool to walk on an actual part of history. As I hope my pictures show, with the exception of a few handrails, everything is maintained/restored to how it was built in the 1300s as a way to defend the borders of the Ming Dynasty from the Mongols (although the Wall is an enduring symbol of China and human ingenuity, it was not entirely effective at securing the Ming Dynasty borders). The entire time I was on the wall, I was pretty much in awe that I was actually there. Because I got to the Wall around 4:30pm, I was able to Facetime Jesse and show him some of the pictures that you’re seeing here live. Because the public portion (and thus the ski lift down) closes at 5pm, I wasn’t able to do to much of a hike, but that didn’t stop me from trekking all the way to the 3rd tower that you can see in the top left picture (because I lost track of time, I had to sprint back). Given its construction over 700 years ago it’s amazing how level and stable all of the steps are (just look at all of those steps). However, because of the recent rain and overall damp weather, some of the steps were quite slick, so those handrails came in handy. Although it was an amazing hike, I can’t help but wonder what it must have been like to hike the Great Wall wearing traditional Chinese sandals/slippers as opposed to my Mizuno running shoes. By the end of the my trek, my feet were definitely a bit sore and I assume my shoes have much better support than traditional footwear. One of the things that surprised me about the wall is just how much of it is stairs as opposed to flat walkways. Maybe this is just my naivete, but I wasn’t expecting almost my entire walk to be a climb up and down steps. Although in hindsight, given how much the natural terrain governs the geography of the wall, I shouldn’t have been surprised. Also, you might be wondering why my pictures seem to be lacking the throngs of tourists that you might see if you search for pictures of the Great Wall online. I assume this is because it was late in the day and the weather had been cold and rainy in the morning (I saw a few groups leaving the area as I approached the ski life), but regardless, the lack of tourists made the trip even more special for me as at times it felt like I was alone with the wall and could be transported back to the past where I might be walking the wall as a scout looking for invaders!

As I mentioned, I got to hike to and walk the Great Wall not once, but twice. I hiked to the Great Wall for a second time on Wednesday morning. Because Roberta & Ted hosted a lovely Sukkot party (see the following section for a description of that and some pictures of our Sukkah), there were a lot of people staying at their home in Huairou (despite Huairou technically being in Beijing, after 10pm or so, it can be difficult to get a taxi to drive you back to the city proper). Bright and early Wednesday morning (at 6am), I headed out on a hike to the Great Wall with another Kehillat member, Hal (the other guy in the photos below). We had approximate directions from Roberta, so we spent much of the first hour of our hike (in which we knew we were approaching the Great Wall since it was getting larger on the horizon) wondering if we were going the right way. As you can see, after we walked out of Huairou proper, the city gave way to a far more rustic and rural/mountainous landscape. Once we left the main road, the we were able to follow a cobblestone path toward the wall. This definitely felt like Robert Frost’s road less traveled. As you can see in the pictures below, this was not the commercial way to the Great Wall that I took previously. Instead, it felt like we were discovering the Great Wall for the first time! Especially, when, because of the dense forrest, it seemed to just appear out of nowhere.

After about an hour of our hike, Hal and I finally made it to the wall (see the pictures below). As you can see, I was again incredibly fortunate to be basically alone on the Wall (we think this was because the previous day had been a holiday and most people were going back to work on Wednesday). Again, I was struck by the shear size of the Wall. As my pictures show, the wall stretches on for what seems like an eternity, tracing the tops of the mountains. Because of the area where we walked was right near a mountain summit, we were able to scale the wall up the mountain. Boy were those stairs steep!!! If you look closely at some of the photos of me and Hal, you can see that these steps were sometimes more like a ladder than stairs. As I mentioned earlier, I can’t imagine how Chinese soldiers were supposed to move quickly across the Wall. While I was sure of my footing climbing up the Wall, when we were going down the stairs, especially in the steep parts, I ended up using the Wall to brace myself so that I wouldn’t fall. After all the hiking and climbing, my calfs and feet definitely felt it the next morning. However, the views were definitely worth it. I mean, just look at that landscape and how the Great Wall snakes across the mountains. It’s difficult to image how the Chinese built it! Because Hal and I hiked the Wall so early in the morning our time, I was able to FaceTime both my brother (who was on the bus on his way to work) and my parents in Saratoga! It was really cool to show them the landscape and have them with me at the Great Wall. Because of how this section was set up, we got to go through one of the “fort” areas that connects different sections, where we had to climb an actual ladder to get to the next portion of the Wall. After being in China for over five weeks at this point, it was incredibly fulfilling to do something that felt authentically Chinese and authentically China!

Overall, the hike took us about 3.5 hours from start to finish. I’m so glad that Hal mentioned the idea of hiking to the Great Wall the previous night as it is one of the extreme highlights of my time in Beijing so far and I definitely wouldn’t have done it by myself!

As many of you know, I really enjoy drawing. Although most of my drawing efforts focus on pencil and ink drawings of manga/anime/comic book characters, the magnificence of the Great Wall deserved to be commemorated. Using my iPad, I created this piece to immortalize my experience with climbing the seemingly endless steps of the Great Wall. I plan to do some more China inspired art while I’m here and you can be sure that I’ll be sharing it on this blog.

Sukkot

As I mentioned earlier, one of the reasons for the trip to Huairou was to celebrate the Jewish holiday of Sukkot. Sukkot is a harvest holiday that traditionally coincided with the harvesting of the fields. As part of Sukkot, Jews traditionally build a Sukkah, a temporary structure made of at least three free standing walls with a roof that allows one to see the stars. I have many fond memories of Sukkot in Saratoga and going to Sukkah Parties at Lollie Abramson’s home, as well as more recently getting to eat a meal in the Sukkah at Marshall Einhorn’s home in Brookline. When I left for China in August, I definitely wasn’t expecting to be able to eat a meal in the Sukkah, let alone build one, in China. As you can see from the pictures below, Roberta and I spent most of Tuesday morning constructing the Sukkah from scratch. We took advantage of a few garden walls and trees in their yard, but for the most part, everything was done by hand and hard work. We started with lots of long pieces of wood that we bought the previous day. Using nails and zip ties, we constructed a pretty impressive Sukkah (at least if you ask me). This is the first time that I remember building a Sukkah from scratch and it’s really cool to see something come together like this in the span of only five or so hours.

As you can see in the above pictures, we didn’t just build the Sukkah for ourselves, but for the Jewish community of Beijing. Roberta & Ted invited the entire Kehillat Beijing community out to their home for a Sukkah party. It was very much in the spirit of my mother’s Rosh Hashanah Sweet’s Party (although there were not nearly as many sweets)! It was really nice to celebrate with so many people and to show off our Sukkah! I think more so than celebrating the High Holy Days or Shabbat in Beijing, building the Sukkah really reminded me that you can be Jewish and celebrate literally anywhere in the world.

Wandering Around Huairou (and Beijing, too!)

Unlike what I showed in last week’s post, I didn’t have as much time to explore Beijing since I was in Huairou for three days. Instead, I want to share some of the interesting sights around Huairou that don’t quite align with going to the Great Wall or celebrating Sukkot. As you can see from a few different pictures (in previous entries), many of the neighborhoods (in both Beijing and Huairou) have ornate gates to mark the entrances to hutongs. Also, it seems like anywhere I turn there are interesting Chinese statues and stone monuments. I believe the stone monuments (like the ones with red lettering) are tied to government buildings (at least the other ones I’ve seen are all near police stations), but I’ll need to double check that. One of the highlights of Huairou was this amazing fruit and vegetable stand that we stopped at. They had an array of fresh and freshly dried fruits. I had some amazing peaches, cherries, apples, and sundried cherry tomatoes. It was also really cool to see pumpkins, too, as I think of those as an American fall crop and didn’t realize they grow them here.

I also did see a few interesting signs and statues in Beijing. As I’ve said before, I love the giraffe signs! I also really love seeing panda statues. The one of the two pandas is right by a subway station that I go to (Wangjing South for those of you who know Beijing) and it’s a giant statue in the middle of a busy road. I’ve also found that the subways stations have some cool art on the inside, like the two lego-esque displays (see the right hand side of the gallery of images below).

Food

It wouldn’t be an Astronomer in Beijing blog post without some food to whet your appetite. After my hike to the Great Wall with Roberta, we all went to a local inn in Huairou for a delicious meal (it’s really nice that Roberta and Ted are vegetarian, since that means we all eat the same food). This was definitely a bit more of a rustic style meal, but it was very tasty. We got a mushroom dish, roasted peanuts – which are really hard to eat with chopsticks, cauliflower, tofu, scallion pancakes, and cabbage.

Although not food from a restaurant, I also wanted to show off a picture of sticky sesame cauliflower that I made for the potluck portion of the Sukkah party. It was a lot of fun to get to cook for everyone and I got a ton of compliments! Because of the rave reviews, I’m planning to make something for an upcoming Shabbat dinner, too!

Animals of Beijing

While I did see a few wild/stray/neighborhood dogs in Huairou, I didn’t get a chance to snap any photos, so instead, here are some cute photos of Roberta & Ted’s dogs, Honey & Mimi. They are definitely photogenic. I also was able to get a selfie with them! Mimi spent the entire drive to Huairou on my lap, so I think the dogs definitely like me. When we were at the inn that we had dinner at, I also saw a very pretty family of cats! They definitely were hoping we’d have some leftovers for them and were very friendly.

East Meets West

Unfortunately, not even the Great Wall can escape the draw of American commercialism. Right by the entry to the Wall where I took the ski lift up, there was a Subway and a Baskin Robbins. That was definitely a bit surreal! On a very different note, on Sunday night, before we drove to Huairou, Ben, Roberta & Ted’s son performed at a “What the Folk” night at a Gulou area bar. This was my first time seeing live, indoor music since I saw the Broadway touring production of The Band’s Visit with my parents at Proctors in Schenechtady. It was a great show (Ben was great) and it was really cool to hear live music again. I’ve featured it in this section, because the bar had a super hipster vibe and I felt like I’d been transported to a Cambridge seeing a small indie show and not Beijing.

Anime and Comics

Although I didn’t see as many comics or anime stores this week, I did see a few different things that I thought were pretty cool! I saw a woman in a Popeye shirt, a guy reading manga on his phone on the subway, and a Neon Genesis Evangelion sticker on someone’s bike! I also saw some (and bought) some really cool DC comics mini figures!

Anyway, if you’ve made it all the way to the end of the blog, thank you so much for reading! I hope you enjoyed seeing all of the pictures, especially of the Great Wall! I hope to hear from many of you! Please don’t hesitate to comment! And if you haven’t yet, subscribe with the button on the right!

Next week’s post will focus on my apartment search in Beijing as well as some other fun adventures that I’ve had here in Beijing, so I hope you’ll check it out!

In Peace,

Emmet