Surviving Chinese New Year In China With Your Grandparents.
Equipment: 1. Cozy AF socks. These were ¥5 ($1) and have cats on them, which feels very on message.
2. A container from which to keep/drink tea. Make sure it’s large enough hold enough liquid to double as a hot water bottle, yet small enough for portability and excuse to get up every 15 minutes for refills.
3. Cashmere. I can’t stress this enough. It’s cold as balls. You need the good stuff.
4. Eye mask and ear plugs. Fireworks, firecrackers, celebration cannons will be going off constantly for a week straight. You need to be prepared if you hope to get any sleep at all.
5. Reading material. Your grandparents will want to be near you, but they will fail to entertain you. You will need a place to escape their endless questions about why your life is a failure. Have something to read.
6. Workout apps. You will eat more, with more frequency, and move less than you have all year. Set aside time to make sure you can still bend. I recommend the Nike Training app for circuits and if anyone have a better yoga app than yoga studio I’d love to hear about it. Something that lets you download the workouts, and stupid ball everything at you.
7. The ability to do without any of your usual means of communication for the entire period of time you are away. The great firewall of China is stronger than ever, goodluck with that vpn. (I can’t wait to see what three weeks worth of emails amounts to)
8. Patience. Your grandparents would move slower than they have previously, and eat earlier, and ask the same questions more times. Be ready for that. Also, tolerance for an unexpected amount of TV shows in which the enemy is a blanket "Japanese". Quite literally every show my grandmother enjoys deals with "The Evil Japanese".
9. Face mask. Look, the pollutants in the air is bad enough. But on the 5th of the new year when it sounds like war outside for 24 hours straight, the amount of gunpowder smoke in the air is no joke either.
10. A ticket home to stare at every night in your freezing cold room because “why do you have the heat on? Let me add another blanket that weighs 2kgs on you so you would have a total of 6kgs weighing you down”.
Remember, This Too Shall End. Happy New Year, monkeys.
bonus points: China now make these magical faux fur lined leggings that are structured enough to be pants. Buy 100. Never be cold again.
similarly, uniqlo heattech has a new Extra Warm range. It’s butter. You would be so cozy you would wear the only top you bought for 4 days straight (like my mother) until we found a uniqlo here and she bought backups. And by 4 days straight, I mean straight. She slept in it, woke up, took a shower, put on a bra and then put it on again. She had a suitcase full of clothes. It’s seriously THAT comfortable.
