Oink
(We interrupt the vacation reminiscing for this late breaking post.)Okay, we've spent our second Spring Festival/Chinese New Year in China and I think we've got it all figured out. To celebrate properly, you need to a) buy some fireworks, b) set some off at random intervals throughout Spring Festival Eve, c) set off the rest of your stash at midnight, and/or d) if you fell asleep before midnight, set off the rest of your stash when you get up in the morning.
Anyway, that's what Spring festival sounded like from the confines of our apartment. We never actually ventured outside or attended any celebrations or anything. In all seriousness, I should probably declare that we are still ignorant lao wai when it comes to Spring Festival. We can only guess at what this all means for the Chinese people. The closest we came to celebrating was to tune in the big holiday extravaganza that plays on CCTV. Or should I say we tried to tune it in. We didn't know exactly which CCTV channel was playing the show, so when we turned on the tube last night we just flipped channels looking for it. There were a couple of shows that looked like a big holiday extravaganza, so we picked the one that looked the most extravaganzish. At about the second commercial break (alas, Chinese TV is also plagued with commercials), I flipped channels again and discovered that about four or five of the CCTVs were playing the same variety show. Oops. Looks like we had been watching some show geared toward military folks. (Over half the audience were in uniform, as were many of the performers.) Ah, well. We stuck with the show we had started watching 'til it was over, then the kids watched about a half hour of the real show. (By that time, I had moved over to the computer as I had all sorts of computery things I wanted to do.)
Today we also didn't celebrate Spring Festival. We did get to see folks having fun when we went out and about this morning. There's one old main street through town--the street that has many of the older shops and buildings. The normal buses weren't running down the road, so we walked that stretch instead. There were quite a number of people walking along the road as well. It wasn't all that much more than a typical weekend afternoon crowd, though it did have more of a festival flavor. One thing I did notice is that while that many shops and restaurants were closed up this weekend, the smaller shops along old main street seemed to be open, for the most part. I don't know if they just can't afford the day off or if they're taking advantage of the crowd. I suppose the real test will be to see if they are open tomorrow or if they close down like all the bakeries did after the Mid-autumn Festival.
posted by John @ 7:01 AM
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