The Tomb Sweeping Festival is the traditional time for Chinese people to visit the graves of their ancestors, clean them, plant new flowers, lament over their losses, and have a big dinner.
Like most traditional things in China, this isn't really practiced anymore. Today, most people go shopping to celebrate the April 4th holiday.
In Chinese, the words for four and death are very similar. They are superstitous to the point of getting phone numbers that don't have fours in them because of the similarities in the words. There was actually a post on Couch Surfing once by a Chinese person announcing that he was changing his phone number because the numbers sounded like "I am going to die." Thus, the festival for the dead is on 4/4.
(On an unrelated note, the number eight is considered auspicious. I'm still not exactly sure what auspicious means, but it's used CONSTANTLY by the Chinese. The reason that the Olympics begin on August 8, 2008 at 8 pm is because it's auspicious.)
So in celebration of a day off work and all those who've died, my friends and I decided to go to Cheng De. This is considered a summer destination, which is why we were able to get train tickets.
Luckily, this summer destination takes it's reputation to heart: it was warm and beautiful. The trees were still bare, but the weather was pleasant the entire time we were there.
We arrived on Friday morning, completely overdressed, but ready for the adventure. Stuffing ourselves with yet another type of Chinese dumplings (there are many, many varieties; I've come to discover that all that really varies is the shape), we set out to find a hotel. This took much, much longer than it should have, but soon we had a decent place to stay for Y35 a night.
I'm starting to appreciate the way Chinese sounds more. It's less of an annoyance to sit on trains or buses listening to them talk at the top of their lungs (probably due in part to the fact that I can understand them every now and then). The woman who welcomed us at the hotel had the most pleasant voice I've ever encountered in any language. While I understood most of her babble, I was paying more attention to the sound of it. Soft and pleasant and slightly deeper than normal Chinese women, it was something I could listen to on my iPod.
After the bags were comfortably resting on our rented beds, we went to the main attraction: the Summer Palace. Not to be confused with the Summer Palace in Beijing, this was a place for the royalty of the Qing Dynasty to retreat from the Beijing summer. There were lots and lots of thrones swaddled in yellow silk. Lots of explanations of the equivalent of the ante-chambers for the king and queen. And a brief blurb describing the Opium Wars.
It led out to a garden for the royalty to do the opposite of basking, whatever that is. It was nice, but would have been much nicer with the trees in bloom. It was much nicer, however, because it lacked the millions and millions of Chinese people taking pictures of everything. There were probably more foreigners with us than Chinese toting Japanese cameras (although the foreigners have there share of Japanese electronics).
After the palace and dinner, we went back to the hotel for a rest. We all ended up falling asleep for the entire night. We were exhausted from not sleeping the night before (anticipating a long five hour nap on the train) and then playing cards and discussing movies on the train.
Amazingly, without any set alarms, we all woke up around nine and set out for breakfast and temples. Another draw of this city was a(nother) very large Buddhist sculpture. Unlike the others I've seen, this one was the Buddhist goddess of mercy. It has 42 arms, each displaying an eye (the third eye) with some piece of fruit or jewlery. It's made of wood, but polished, painted, or somethinged to a point that it looks like bronze. Beautiful, but another one of those things that you can't photograph.
After this temple, we made our way to another temple. This one was built as a replica of the famous on in Lhasa, Tibet by a Qing King. Apparently, religion used to be such a large part of the lives of the government officials, that they needed a closer holy place for the practice of their Tibetan Buddhism. It looks exactly like the pictures I've seen of the real one, but much different from other temples. Which was refreshing as they all tend to look exactly the same.
We spent the rest of the day exploring the many levels and rooms and shops and prayer flags and vistas that it offered. After, we fought with bus drivers over when they were leaving and where they were going before winding up on a bus back to Beijing.
A bus that took only side roads, not the highway. A bus that wound up taking nearly five hours to go 230 kilometers. A bus that was crammed with Chinese migrant workers with enough luggage for 16 people each. But it wasn't that bad (actually it wasn't bad at all; I've experienced much worse in this country).
I arrived home at about 10:45 pm to sleep through the rest of the weekend. Cheng De was pleasant. It was as beautiful as China will allow it to be.
"This place must have been gorgeous before all the industry with the palace and parks and temples," remarked Mario.
I could only thoughtfully nod as I watched the dump trucks filled with coal pass the taxi window.
