But, I digress. The point is, since we last blogged, we have experienced Chinese New Year firsthand, and we are certain you'd like to hear all about it. To properly understand the atmosphere of Chinese New Year, you need to think about how important atmosphere is to the Christmas season in America. During Christmastime in America, everything you see radiates festive-ness. It is the same here during New Year...everywhere you look, everywhere you go, everyone you see...you cannot miss the fact that Chinese New Year is upon you. Every shop is converted from a shoe store, grocery store, convenience store....into a miniature fireworks outlet. Every window in the city is plastered with "paper-cuts." They are not dissimilar to the paper snowflakes we all made as children. They are decorative designs of flowers, chinese characters, or animals cut out of red paper and hung on windows. Here is an example of a paper cut made especially for this year, the "year of the ox."
Not only are firecrackers everywhere, but they are cheap! And so accessible. It is unbelievably easy for any Chinese kid, no matter the age, to obtain both firecrackers and a lighter to entertain himself. Which means it was equally easy for Zack to fulfill all his firecracker fantasies by buying enough explosives to destroy an entire lego-nation. Here is a sampling of Zack's Chinese New Year purchases:
He spent days running around the neighborhood blowing up various objects and inviting children to help him in his antics. Ordinarily, we hear firecrackers a few times a day, just on any old day. But on Chinese New Year, we hear firecrackers all day long. The loudest is at midnight, when each family lights their biggest firecrackers...it puts the fourth of July to shame. The strange thing is that it is so steeped in superstition. So many of the traditions are based on superstition or getting good luck. Everyone hangs signs on their front doors that have the word for “happiness” hung upside-down. This is because the word “upside-down” in Chinese sounds like the word “come to you.” So hanging happiness upside down is like saying “happiness come to you.” Here is an example on our neighbor's door:
One tradition is to eat dumplings on new years day and as they are prepared, a coin is put inside one of them. Whoever eats the dumpling with the coin in it is said to have good luck all year. One crazy example is that one afternoon I was sitting at home and suddenly heard the loudest firecrackers I have ever heard. And it sounded like they were right outside my door. So I went to the door and looked out, and one man had laid a long strip of black cats up the concrete stairs leading past my door to his door. Can you imagine how loud black cats are inside a concrete stairwell with steel doors? On New Years Eve, families all light loud firecrackers outside their doors to “scare evil spirits” away from their homes. That was one tradition we did not partake in.
Since Chinese New Year (January 26), we haven't been up to much. Our students all came back to the city last week, so last week was our first week of classes. We were delighted to be back at work at long last, and since last week we have spent a lot of time with our students. Many of them brought us gifts from their hometown...our favorite and the weirdest was a bag of duck tongues. Yes, duck tongues...complete with the tendon-like-strings that used to attach the tongue to the now speechless ducks. Unfortunately, if we are going to keep up the pace in our work, I need to sleep at some point. I'll leave you with a picture snapped at the bus station.
.......just in case any of you need to debark.
