Not having particularly large numbers of Christians, for most of Asia Christmas is not an official holiday. Everybody trundles off to work at 8am in the morning like any other day, banks and government services remain fully operational (if completely unhelpful) and few – if any – people have trees or other decorations in their homes – gifts and the like are rare.

As such, it has been interesting to see how Christmas is becoming a bit of a “thing” here in Beijing, and entirely unlike what one would expect. Nearly every mall, shop, and restaurant has some sort of decoration, ranging from tinsel snowflakes to cutouts of Shèngdàn Lǎorén (Santa Claus), to big signs proclaiming 圣诞节快乐 (Merry Christmas). While old people tend to not care and are usually more than barely aware that the holiday is passing, the younger generations (and therefore the commercial enterprises who depend on their dollars) seem to be quite into the whole thing, with groups of coworkers sharing cakes at the office or going out for meals with little Reindeer antler hats on.

One aspect of it all is that Beijing becomes something of an expat ghost-town for the holidays. Many people leave to go back to their home countries, and those who live here tend to hunker down in their little expat enclaves such as Shunyi or Wangjing. What’s left are the (typically younger) foreigners who either couldn’t leave because of work, or decided simply not to bother. The expat restaurants and bars all begin the annual business “dry season” which usually lasts until the arrival of spring (and, coincidentally enough, actual rain).

Thus, it was with some surprise last night that, as a few of us went out for drinks at Q Bar, home to some of Beijing’s finest mixed drinks, traffic in the city was a complete mess. Any place that had bars and clubs was a complete madhouse, and even big shopping areas were all quite packed. Yet, only those places that catered to the locals were full – expat places such as Sanlitun and the like were still completely deserted.

What was going on was that all the locals were going out and partying. But instead of doing presents or any sort of family thing, it was more along the lines of New Years partying, with countdowns to Christmas tree lightings, party hats and streamers, and otherwise drunken revelry. No arguing here about how the holiday has lost its spiritual meaning and roots here – it never had any in the first place. For the Chinese, it’s just another way to participate in some of the things that Westerners like, but do it in their own unique way, and have a blast at the same time.

Here is a video from the local Chinese YouTube rip off (called YouKu):

In another uniquely Chinese way, many of those restaurants and shops will be sporting those same Christmas decorations until well into the summer. It is not unusual for me to be having Sweet and Sour Pork somewhere in July, with a big bearded Santa watching over me.

Well, after a good six weeks of traveling to many different places (Singapore, Hong Kong, New York City, Maine, and finally Seattle), I’m back in Beijing now. I had originally planned to avoid coming here on account of how difficult the visa situation was supposed to be, but after some research, it turned out to be quite trivial to get a full year tourist visa (with the caveat that I have to leave every two months and then come back). But with all the pre-Olympic-hullabaloo, I was still nervous about coming back here during the middle of the games—what would things be like?

The short answer is that it’s a bit more annoying here, but not ultimately not all that different. Security measures that have been in place for years but were never seriously enforced before are suddenly being checked rigorously. I awoke in a panic this morning when I realised that I slept through most of yesterday and didn’t make it to the local gong an ju – public security office – to register. So I ran there this morning and started chatting with them and they were all smiles and then told me to come back later because they couldn’t get to the government website anyway.

Traffic definitely is better than it was before—Banning half the cars from the road is, it seems, an awesome way to improve traffic and air quality. There are dedicated lanes for the Olympics here and there which make the occasional mess of traffic still, but overall, the roads are deserted compared to what they were merely two months ago.

Air has been harder to measure. The first two days after I arrived were very cloudy, humid, and overcast, so it didn’t seem that nice out. A nice round of thunderstorms, yesterday, however, cleared nearly everything up, and today one can see the mountains surrounding the city (which I didn’t notice when I first moved to China until after nearly three weeks of living here!).

Oddly enough, compared to some of the DSL I was experiencing in the USA, the Internet here is stunningly fast and reliable. Sure, some sites are blocked, but that’s what SSH proxies were invented for, and I’ve pretty much got everything I want at my fingertips, with great speeds to boot.

My favourite thing about being back? The food. It’s awesome eating here. Lots of vegetables (even the meat dishes), lots of fruit, and the occasional ice cream here and there to help with the heat and humidity. I’ve already hit up the good Szechuan restaurants, and will keep working on all my regular smaller places before leaving again next week.

One thing I found interesting is that, despite the obvious pride at doing so well at the Olympic games and winning so many gold medals, many Chinese people I talk with are pretty sardonic about the whole thing, recognising that governments can pretty much buy as many gold medals as they’re willing to spend money on…

So, here’s to hoping that by the time I come back from India, China has returned to being the same old crazy and fun place that it’s been to live in. I can’t wait.

There are lots of ways in which a website can be annoying. Favourite methods include: rotating and blinking animated GIFs (or worse, Flash), popup advertising windows, unexpected background music files, or just plain all around atrociously ugly page design. (I’ve been quite guilty of this in the past!)

But until you’ve lived in China, or at least spent some time browsing around websites here on the mainland, there’s probably one way to annoy the living bejeezus out of people that you’ve never thought of.

To demonstrate, simply visit any Chinese website, such as the Bank of China or something else such as Chinaren. Don’t worry if you can’t see the characters, they’re not important for this experiment. (Windows XP users can add them by going to Control Panel /International and installing the Asian Font Pack, while Vista and Mac users will have all these fonts installed already).

Once you have one of these pages up in your browser window, click on a link or two. Click on some more links on those pages. Try to get back to where you came from. Within minutes, you’ll have at least a dozen browser windows littering your desktop, or at best, for those Firefox users with the correct settings, dozens of tabs.

You could be forgiven for thinking that this was specific to a few sites with particularly bad design. And you’d be totally wrong. This is completely endemic here in local website design, and is how the locals think that the “Internets” should work. Indeed, there is almost no concept of forward or back button usage any more, and it is not uncommon to see users with well over twenty browser windows littering their desktop at any given time. While Windows users can at least expect the Task Bar to group similar windows, Mac users just end up using the mouse to move the windows out of the way until needed later, or until they just close the browser application completely.

Ultimately, the problem becomes such that, if you want to fix the site design to not do things this way, you will confuse your user. When they click to go to a new page, and they then subsequently finish visiting it, they will close the browser window and proceed to go looking through their other browser windows until they find the one from whence (they hope) they came.

The only thing I can say? At least blatent ripoffs of other sites on the internet don’t seem to have felt compelled to introduce this behaviour into their clones. For everybody else, it’s going to take a while to change this design.

Living in China for the last few months has been surprisingly hassle-free Internet-wise. In the living room here I’ve got a 768k DSL connection, and the government blocking of sites has not been too big of a deal, given that I often don’t do much more than read digg.com or check email.