Last Wednesday was the Dragon Boat Festival here in China. This is only the second year that this has a been a national holiday but the festival has been celebrated for thousands of years.

Known here as Duanwu Jie, it falls on the fifth day of the fifth month of the Chinese lunar calendar (approximately late May to mid-June). The holiday commemorates the death of Qu Yuan, a famous Chinese poet from the kingdom of Chu who lived during the Warring States Period.  Qu Yuan tried unsuccessfully to warn his king and countrymen against the expansionism of their Qin neighbours. When the Qin general Bai Qi, took the Chu capital, in 278 BC, Qu Yuan was supposedly so upset that he drowned himself in the Miluo River after writing the Lament for Ying. According to legend, packets of rice were thrown into the river to prevent fish from eating the poet’s body. Another version states that zongzi were given to placate a dragon that lived in the river.

Zongzi are triangles of glutinous rice stuffed with either sweet (red bean) or savoury (salty pork) fillings, wrapped in bamboo leaves and steamed. Today they are widely eaten in China and Asia around this time of year. Some are put in fancy packaging and given away as gifts.

Here is a report from Taipei about zongzi http://taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2010/06/17/2003475694

Fatburger opened in Beijing a little over a month ago. The name may not be familiar in the UK, if you happen to live on West Coast of the US then the name will be more recognisable. They have been around in the US for more than 50 years. They use fresh (not frozen) beef and cook their burgers to order.

For the Beijing branch beef is imported from Australia, ground on the premises and turned into big, juicy 8oz patties. Potatoes are brought in from the US to be transformed into either fat fries or skinny fries, although for me only fat fries will do. If you don’t fancy beef then you can get a grilled or deep fried chicken sandwich, or a bacon and egg sandwich , or a hot dog. Onion rings are made with real onions taste fab and are a must order.

This is not your run of the mill fast food joint. Burgers are cooked to order and brought to your table. Comfortable seating and great tunes make you want to linger and watch the world go by.

A regular combo meal, which consists of a single patty burger, fries and a soda will set you back RMB 60 with the options of cheese, bacon and a fried egg costing another RMB 5 each. For those with bigger appetites, a double patty burger (RMB 60) and a triple patty (yes, 24 oz!!) burger (RMB 80) are available.

http://www.fatburger.com/home/

Recently the cost of hourly parking was increased across the whole of Beijing. Parking charges were quadrupled! They went up from RMB 2 per hour (about 20p) to RMB 8 per hour (about 80p). By comparison with the UK, this is still tiny, but for Beijingers parking is now a significant cost.

The intended effect was to try and move people out of cars and onto public transport as traffic here is rapidly approaching grid lock. I have to say that traffic does seem to have eased slightly. Many of the car parks are now almost empty and traffic flow on the main roads is slightly easier. This has got to be a positive move for an increasingly choked up city.

We woke up this morning to a very eery, almost Martian sight. Beijing’s first dust storm in 5 or 6 years turned the sky orange. Millions of tons of sand  has blown in from the Gobi desert and is currently floating over the city turning everything shades of orange.

I took some pictures from our apartment.

I don’t plan on venturing out until the skies clear as I can already see thick layers of sand on the roads.

As many people know, we are about to enter the Chinese year of the Tiger. New Years Eve is tomorrow and the official public holiday starts tomorrow and finishes next Friday.

Spring Festival (so called because it heralds the start of Spring and the Lunar New Year) is the biggest and most important holiday in China. Traditionally it is time when families will get together and of course eat. In fact, this time of year is the biggest mass migration on the planet with somewhere in the region of 250 million people on the move throughout China. Plane tickets are in short supply and train and buses are packed as people head back home for the holidays. People have been traveling early to avoid the rush and all week Beijing has been getting quieter as people leave for home.

On New Years Eve families get together to eat and the main food eaten is jiao zi or dumplings (a bit like ravioli). They can be filled with just about anything  but usually they contain pork and spring onion or cabbage. The whole family will help make them and will spend all afternoon and into the evening mincing meat and filling these dumplings. Once made they are dropped into boiling water to cook for a few minutes. They are eaten hot dipped in dark vinegar mixed with garlic or ginger. Left overs are usually fried up the next day and are known as guo tie or pot stickers.

This year we will remain in Beijing and will be busy making jioazi come tomorrow night.

China seems to have been hit with similar amounts of snow and cold weather as the UK. On Sunday it snowed all day and put down about 6 to 8 inches of snow causing chaos on the roads. The temperature also plummeted to around -15! Most flights were cancelled or delayed. Apparently this is the worst winter weather in about 30 years. Things improved on Monday and by the afternoon everything was getting back to normal.

Today it is still cold (-5 down to -12 in the evening) but the skies are blue and the snow is rapidly disappearing.

Christmas and New Year in Beijing were very quiet. Coming back from the sunshine of South Africa on the 23rd and with Christmas Day being a normal working day, we missed the build up and the whole vibe you get around Christmas. Of course the kids loved the presents and having mum and dad back but it was not quite the same as Christmas’ past back in the UK.

Christmas lunch consisted of seafood (mackerel and clams) made by myself and shared with our staff (it was a working day). Not very traditional but very good non the less. Dinner was with some old friends at a very good Indian restaurant called the Tamarind. I would highly recommend the restaurant. Boxing Day was a bit more traditional when I cooked a ham and some of our English friends came over. I even managed to bring a Christmas pud over from Jo’burg. All very nice.

New Year’s Day is a holiday here but our New Year’s Eve was not very rock and roll. Dinner with the kids then an Indiana Jones marathon before phone calls on the stroke of midnight!

Time flies. The time working in joburg has been totally eye-opening and a refreshing break from my Beijing work routine! I took Duncan to my favourite vendor stall for breakfast this morning and we had pap – African maize meal porridge - for the first time topped with homemade chicken curry – boy was it delicious. Washed the whole lot down with coffee for me and rooibos tea for Duncan sitting streetside under the morning sun. We watched the England-South Africa test match cricket this afternoon and I really needed to pair up cricket terminology with baseball ones to understand what it was all about: bowler is pitcher; bowl is a pitch; batsman is batter; a six is like a home run…and that stump looks more like a stick….you get the idea. And I finally understood why they call the England-Australia Ashes game – that little bit of bale at the top of the sticks….we watched Invictus and absolutely recommend it!!

By the way, Cape Town was magnificent – a younger feel than Nice, less ritzy than Monaco, reminds me of San Francisco in some places and definitely more Beverly Hills than anything South Africa or Africa. It is a very tourist friendly city and the sights and ocean are spectacular – we made it down to the cape of good hope but whale watching season had ended so we didn’t get on a boat during our short weekend getaway.

And for the record, joburg is alright. Yes the high walls suck but it’s not as scary as it had seemed before I got here.

OK so this is about 2 weeks late.

Last week quite busy – actually every day goes by at a good clip, even weekends. But the thing was my colleague and I had back-to-back interviews with Africa’s two largest banks in one day and you can’t beat copy like that. I’m learning to tell at least one African language apart from all the 6-7 others – Xhosa, which is the heritage of Nelson Mandela. There is a soft clicking sound to make every time one encounters the letter ‘X’ so one of the bank CEOs we chatted with was Mr. Nxasana - *click*aasana would be how to pronounce his name.

My colleague and I are off to Gaborone – pronounced Haborone – tomorrow to cram in a slew of interviews with the likes of De Beers, SABMiller, a Shanghai-based private Chinese enterprise and the country’s state power utility to discuss everything from the diamond industry to China-Africa ties to the power crisis facing southern Africa and Africa in general. Neither of us have ever been and we are still a bit puzzled at exactly how spread out Gaborone as that will affect our timeliness from one meeting to the next. Google map isn’t very definitive and I guess it doesn’t help when addresses in the city are listed under plot numbers. Well I guess we lay the best plans possible and the rest we shall just have to fly by the seat of our pants. We come back to Joburg on Wednesday evening.

Funny thing is there are so many cafes and restaurants around where I am but I’ve yet to really have an African meal – though I will say a Castle Lager is great; as are the generous helpings of 1 glass of house wine; as are the spectacular 7pm thunder and electric lightning storms in Joburg that occur like clockwork regularly.

The local cabs – technically minivans – remain mysterious. The ones the locals ride are hailed by how one points one’s hand and the only one I’ve learned is sticking the forefinger up to mean Joburg. But it is different hand signals if you want to go to Sandton or Soweto or Pretoria or any local neighborhood and the only way to learn the hand signals is to ask passengers in the cab – and I have yet to see a non-black passenger crammed in these cabs that can hold 15 people at a time with no seatbelts. And giving the taxi fare is also a collective process whereby the onus is the the persons sitting closest to the front of the cab that has to collect the fare, organize change, and hand over the correct sum to the driver – of course this I learned from the cabs I take – plush cars prearranged by a hotel that are really eating into my budget but are a necessity for staying safe.

Sandton, where our office is, is perhaps the richest square mile in Africa I’ve been told. It is so modern – of course not as shiny new as Beijing’s central business districts – and one could be deceived in thinking the rest of Joburg, or South Africa - and if you are really not thinking about it Africa overall – is this way. It’s fairly fine to walk around during the day, though it is hot in summer. When you see the inner city of Joburg and also Pretoria it is as bad, and at times worse, than the baddest city blocks of Los Angeles or New York. Contrast that with the suburbs here further afield than Sandton and it feels like Green Valley in Las Vegas or middle Missouri – it’s pretty flat around the city – and some of the neighborhoods are like a Desperate-Housewives-but-with-kids feel when you see designer mums out for brunch with their little ones in enclosed communities and huge-ass houses – and why are most kids I see around all barefoot!

Arrival day in Joburg – too late, too dark

First day – clear blue sky, early summer comfortable temperature; spent the entire day at a conference at a local academic institution hearing about the China-Africa relationship from many Africans. V refreshing views that one doesn’t get in Beijing – that being, the onus for addressing/resolving some of the concerns cropping up in the bilateral relationship is on the African countries, not necessarily all on China. I start to notice how there’s so much walls all around the local landscape and how offices are situated behind the walls, rather than just residential housing that one associates with such walls.

Second day – stepped into office for the first time in the afternoon. Reminds me of the old foreign correspondent days of working out of a cramped hovel littered with too much paper, coffee and newspapers. Apparently we are moving the office, but in the meantime the sole correspondent for us in Joburg – only one of just three full-time reporters we have on the entire continent – is doing his best to co-exist with the other people who are in sales and selling stuff that has nothing to do with our main news gathering content. My colleague tells me that at an older office before this one, someone got shot in the stairwell and there were a few bad incidents. The ladies room near the current office is via a stairwell and I wonder how sound proof it is from the offices and elevators. My colleague gives me a lift at the end of the day and he says Joburg is one of the ugliest cities he’s lived in – the constant need to drive is terrible. I asked my colleague if Joburg could be considered a hardship posting.

Third day – full day in the office and still trying to deal with IT problems. I found out it is walkable to the office from my hotel and I try it though not before I split my credit cards, ID and cash between my shoulder bag and my pants pocket. It’s a lovely walk and I stop at a local street stall – Lindy’s Fast Food hand painted on its front – and buy a simple egg and cheese sandwich from the three plump African matrons behind the counter frying and cooking in kerchiefs. A local comes up and gets what looks like three portions of mashed potato blobbed together with gravy, but I think the matrons tell me it is the local mealies. What I do find is I smile a lot more because the hotel staff and cabbies all smile at me and ask how am I doing – and I don’t think it is just about them being good about customer service. And of course some local shouted Ni Hao! at me.

I went to my first braai tonight. The host was an American reporter based in Joburg. He became a single dad when he adopted his son at 4 months old in Thailand. He met his partner out there too and both with the adopted son moved to Joburg together – Tommy, his Thai partner, barbequed fabulously; the son is 4 years old now. The reporter’s brother and sister-in-law (Vietnamese American) live in Houston but from a small town in New Orleans. Another couple – she Thai American (with a Mum in Las Vegas!), and he French – came with their 18-month-old daughter, while a lady came with her half-Zim son. Two African ladies also joined the party with their nearly 4 year old daughter.

So much still to absorb and tomorrow is only Day 4!