The Spring Festival!

Welcome to the year 4706, the year of the rat, according to the Chinese lunar calendar. In fact I was not able to find a single person who knew exactly what year we were. I had to look for it on internet. That is to say that apparently even Chinese people rely exclusively on the standard calendar (2008). Nonetheless, the last week has been most explosive. The new lunar year celebrations are the biggest and most important in China.







Tradition wants that we eat dumplings, light up fireworks both in large quantities. So we did with a small group of friends. We made the dumplings by ourselves from scratch under the supervision of my friend Chris’s Chinese wife. Chris is one of the people I went to Changbaishan with. It was a lot more work that buying them pre-made but it was fun since it felt a bit like solving the small mystery of how they are made. As for the fireworks, well I have never been to a war front but I can imagine it to be just like that. Imagine hundreds of millions of armatures playing with explosives in the street, even narrow ones, in the parking lots, in the yard, well just about everywhere across the country. It lasted the whole week but it was particularly intense on New Year’s even at midnight. Totally insane, hospitals’ emergency rooms must have been overfilled, although I didn’t double check that.











For the rest of the week, the city seemed almost deserted. The rush hour busses and metros are usually packed with 2 people per square foot were then almost empty. No traffic jams in the streets either. Most people took the week off and went back home outside the city to celebrate with their respective families. However I still found myself swimming in ultra dense crowds at a few occasions. Most parks and temples host some kind of events. For the most part they consist of what we would know as circuses, with all the venders that sell all sorts of toys and foods. Meat and squid skewers were particularly popular. There were many of those games you play to win stuffed animals, and some large attractions.



















































Thanks to an acquaintance, I had the chance to visit a temple outside of downtown where I could watch some more traditional festivities. We were presented some dragon dances, a more southern tradition, and various abilities displays such as a fire splitter, some Kong fu action, and that guy who could do push-ups on 2 fingers and a hand-stand on 4. It was impressive. After dinner watch a special show of fireworks. From what I could understand, they were melting some metal in a small furnace. They would then pick small piece of melted metal with sticks and then proceeded under a bamboo structure covered with fireworks, and then threw it up over their heads. The result was a spectacular rain of sparks, that feel engulfed them, and never continuous explosions of fireworks. It was quite special and very beautiful.

I’ll leave it at that for now but before wishing you all, and especially the ladies, a happy valentine’s day. I hope you won’t miss me too too much on this special occasion. If so, be assured that I shall be with you in thoughts. ;-)