MOMVISIT, PART I: THE LAST DAYS OF WINTER

Spring Festival was way back in mid-February but Spring itself never bothered to show up. By mid-April I was obsessively checking the weather forecasts, which would promise a warming up in the coming week only to retract that promise as the new week approached. Aside from a pair of anomalous days back in March, it was in the 40s and low 50s every day. This didn't bother me enormously, as I enjoy cold weather (so long as I have a warm house to return to) but I worried that it would ruin the upcoming visit of my mother, who hates and fears the cold even more than Auntie Zhang and her cohort, lao taitais (old wives) who cluck disapprovingly over my under-clad calves. I know it is boring to talk about the weather but sometimes it really matters.

There was blustery wind and heavy pollution the day my mother arrived but two days later it was in the 60s. Fearing it wouldn't get any better than this I dragged mom out to the Summer Palace where we made our serious, beneficent-ruler faces while wearing imperial garb...

took a pedal boat out on Kunming Lake...

and climbed up the hill to admire the restored palace pagodas.

The itinerary for the next few days was similarly weather-determined. When it was cold and/or rainy we hit up museums (below, a giant oil painting of Chairman Hu visiting the scene of the 2007 Sichuan earthquake at the National Art Gallery) and markets;

when it warmed up marginally we explored temples and wandered the alleys of old Beijing

Turtle-pose at Yonghegong Lama Temple.

Running into Sophie and Wu Jie at Xiangzi's shop near the temple.

Tricycle bearing a massive burden.

We had originally planned to take an overnight train to the scenic (and comparatively southern) city of Hangzhou and stay a few days but that proved unfeasible. So to the weather I said: "you're not the boss of me!" and to the mother I said: "outskirts of Beijing here we come!"

Our first journey was to the mountains west of the city and on the way we stopped for detour at the Tian Yi Mu museum, both the mausoleum of a famous eunuch and a museum of all things eunuch-y, including some shudder-inducing photographs, tools, and clay models, a mummified eunuch, and some ancient stone dildos.

Oh, and also goats.

A two-hour bus ride took us to Cuandixia, a 400 year-old village preserved (from the outside at least) to look almost exactly like it did at its founding in the Ming Dynasty. More important than this however, was that it was SNOWING and windy when we arrived. After hiking the hill behind the village with a friendly Columbian-American fellow we met on the bus, and devouring a warming dinner, we cocooned ourselves in blankets in our spotless but unheated rooms (our "hotel" is visible in the center-left of the picture below, identifiable by its pale wood doors and two red lanterns). The wind howled all night but the morning was sunny and significantly warmer. We hiked up the hill facing the village, climbing higher and higher for increasingly dramatic views.

A typical alley in the center of the village.

On the bus ride back we passed a nuclear facility on the outskirts of the city next to a hilltop pagoda. Oh China.

It was sunny but still cold the next day; undaunted, we took another public bus three hours south of the city to see the karst towers and other curious glacial rock formations along the Juma river.

All along the hiking route there were signs calling attention to the names and shapes of the mighty rocks. Above, the five grandfathers; below, Sea Turtle Mound.

After scratching our heads a few times over which lump of stone was a crow and which was a pigeon, we were finally able to identify a new rock formation of our very own. Below, behold "T-Rex talks to Stegosaurus":

One of the more impressive features of this area was the "crack in the sky", a walkable chasm less than a meter wide and about 40 feet long. My crappy camera wasn't really up for capturing pictures of the place but this gives a feeling of its majesty:

Looking up:

Monkeying around:

The path was a little treacherous but mom and I are both part mountain goat so we made it through ok.

Back in Beijing things were looking up. According to the weather forecast it was going to be 67 the next day, and after that single day of Spring, highs would remain in the 80s until my mother was due to return to dreary Seattle. We celebrated by walking around the old city taking pictures of courtyard doorways,

envying the elderly and their incredibly cool motor-vehicles,

And eating. A lot.

But not this:

My mother loved malatang, the street dish which involves choosing a selection of greens, tofu, fish products, and other (including quail eggs, duck blood, and seaweed), then having it all boiled together and covered in sesame sauce.

Like so: