Spring festival is the best time of the year in China, and also the most nightmarish time to travel. It is the one holiday that everyone in China celebrates. To people like me and my students, all the other Chinese holidays are mostly seen as just days off of school, but the spring festival is something special (well, technically so is mid autumn festival, but its not the same). I decided to go home with Hui, and I had an absolutely great time with all his great family. While the other foreign teachers, who are totally all rich and can afford it, took lavish vacations going to other countries, I think I had a better time just hanging out, having quality time with Hui's family.
We started our journey early in the morning, getting on a long train ride to Hefei. I was playing Kingdom Hearts on my new 3DS the whole time, which was so awesome, because you all know how I feel about playing Kingdom Hearts. Anyway, we arrived in Hefei, and Hui's dad and cousin picked us up. Then it was a 2+ hour car ride to Yuexi. I slept most of the way, because I was completely exhausted. That was the point when my sickness started. When I was in Yuexi, it was just a cough, but when I got back I started getting more and more sick. I thought I was like dying or something, because I wasn't getting better, but I found out I just had sinusitis, which is also not great. As of this very moment I still have it, but I have learned from doing a little research that this disease can last a whole year. I really really really really hope it doesn't last a whole year. Its already been half a year as it is. I can say that I feel a lot better than I did before though.
In Yuexi we had absolutely the most warm welcome. Hui's grandma was outside the door looking so happy and yelling "you came back!" Hui's grandma is so sweet, and she really likes me a lot. Before we came, she was having some health problems, and she was in a lot of pain. Hui said she likes Buddhism, so I bought her a little speaker device that recites sutras and Buddhist songs, and she really liked it. I was happy I could give her something that could make her happy while she was in so much pain. I was really touched, because she was playing it almost all day every day we were in Yuexi.
The first couple of days there we just relaxed and went to visit the family members I had met in the summer. One thing that really made me happy, was every meal we ate at every different person's house or restaurant had my favorite dish, 红烧肉. This time I think my favorite was the one made by Hui's aunt, who also made me a pair of shoes. When I showed them to my mom, she asked if they could believe the size of my foot? Yeah, if you didn't know I have really big feet. I mean, in America they aren't that big just a size 9 1/2, but in China that's a size 41, and they don't usually make shoes bigger than 39. I have had to go to special plus size foot stores to buy shoes. Yep, you read right....plus size. Anyway, the shoes kept me nice and warm inside the house, and I really liked wearing them!
The morning before the fist night of the Spring festival, I woke up hearing what I thought was a chicken going crazy, and when I went downstairs into the kitchen, I saw a dead chicken in a bowl. Yeah, what I heard was really a dying chicken. While I'm on the topic of chickens, there was one cool thing I got to do while I was there. During that week Hui kept taking me back to the chickens to see if they were laying eggs, and finally we found one, so I got to hold an egg that was just laid by a chicken. It was actually warm. I'm not sure if that's cool or not, just interesting.
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| my shoes! |
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| there's that chicken |
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| this was a gift to Hui's family from Alibaba. they are so thoughtful on holidays. |
At this point, I think I have a lot of thing to explain. Since Hui's family lives in the countryside, we celebrated Spring Festival in a very traditional way. Maybe people in America haven't even heard of celebrating in this way. Because Hui's grandmother is the oldest person in the family, everyone came to Hui's house to see her, because in Chinese culture there is greater respect for old people.
My reaction to Spring Festival is that its pretty much like if you were to take all of the American holidays and put them into one. One thing I never knew when I was in America was that on New Year's Eve everyone will travel around to different houses to visit family and neighbors. I say that, but Hui told me that most of his neighbors are actually family members, so that works. The kids I saw were going around with bags that got filled with candy (so, there's your Halloween). I personally didn't go around to different houses with Hui and his dad. I stayed in to help Hui's mom and grandma, because, as I said before, a lot of people were coming to his house to see his grandma. Another reason why I didn't go around is because we aren't married, and people would try to give me a hongbao, which would be awkward.
So, my job staying back at the house was to give every guest a cup of tea, even if they didn't want it, giving snacks and candy to the kids, and giving every man a cigarette. This is apparently the thing that you do when people come over during the holiday, because Hui came back with his pockets full of cigarettes (he doesn't smoke). There is also a gift exchange that happens in the days following new years eve, but it truly is just the thought that counts, as they are exchanging really simple things like a bottle of 白酒 (baijiu) or something like that. Based on what I could see in the supermarket around that time, it was basically just groceries in very fancy and high quality packaging (it was really nice though, and I wanted to actually buy some of it for myself). I made many mistakes with the gift exchanging thing when it was just me and grandma at home, but I'm not going to mention them here, because as I am a foreigner, my mistakes didn't manage to offend anyone (I was still embarrassed though, because Hui's family was repeating it to everyone).
I know I'm kind of going backwards here, but on New Year's Eve people typically have a big dinner. This dinner will usually include fish, because of a Chinese pun, 年年有余（鱼). It is in fact a pun, so I will try to explain it to those not in the know as best I can. You could translate this phrase to mean "having a surplus in the new year", but what does this have to do with fish? Well, the character for surplus 余, and the character for fish 鱼, have the same pronunciation and tone (yu), so you could read it as "having a surplus in the new year" or "having a fish in the new year", and so we eat fish in the hopes that we will have a surplus of food in the coming year. There it is, hope you're not confused. Anyway, when you see our picture, you might think its not too big of a dinner, but it was just us five people eating, so it was actually still a big dinner, really delicious, and obviously included some 红烧肉, because it is just great. In my picture of our dinner, you will see my hongshaorou right in between the shrimp and the corn chicken soup. It is just amazing, and, if I didn't know any better, I would say you can translate it to mean greatest thing you've ever put in your mouth pork, because that's what its called in English by me. As it is, there's no good way to translate it, so you can just call it hongshao pork(because when you are speaking Chinese, if it just says meat, it means pork).
There's another thing about dinner I haven't mentioned yet. A big big Chinese spring festival tradition is to exchange 红包 (red envelopes) at the dinner table. I say "exchange", but if you are a kid and don't have a job, you just "receive", buuuuut we have jobs, so I did the receiving, and Hui did the exchanging. We spent the money together though. We bought some clothes, and used it to buy our groceries after we both spent a month's wages on plane tickets to America. I still have some left, and I might just be spending that at Disneyland.....or maybe not. I'm not really sure what I'm going to do with it. That's that, I got five hongbaos in all from various family members, one of them had to fight me to give it to me, haha. That's one thing about gifts in China, when someone first gives it to you, you kind of have to fight them and say you don't want it, otherwise it could sometimes be not polite. I don't mean you literally say "I don't want it", but you get what I'm trying to say.
Well, that's been a massive wall of text. Here, have some pictures!
Now for more about New Years Eve, because really, we did so much. On New Year's Eve in China, at midnight what do you think you should be doing? Well, I'll tell you what we were doing. We were setting of the longest strand of firecrackers I have ever seen. I mean, it was so long it would be illegal in the US. I'm going to include a couple of rough videos of all the people setting off fireworks around the neighborhood, but first, just take a good look at this strand of firecrackers. I mean, my brother would love to just go outside and set that thing off. When we did it, I was kind of thinking I have to show this to him ASAP.
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| ready to unleash this beast! |
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| beautiful! |
Here we have a video of Hui singing I think just as good as Katy Perry, and telling me to wait and take video later when it turns midnight.
In this video we set off our strand of firecrackers. We had to run for cover to get away from the black pieces coming off of the big fireworks.
Another interesting tradition people over in America don't mention too much is that on New Year's Eve you have to turn every single light in your house on, and not turn it off for 24 hours. I was totally ok with that. The lights were all on, and outside the fireworks were booming, but I slept just fine. I was cold and exhausted from all the being sick and entertaining guests, so I slept like a log. Good day! The next few days there were always people coming in and out of the house to see grandma, and sometimes Hui would have gone to another house with his parents, so I was doing more entertaining. One day they had a huge lunch party where they had three whole tables full of people eating, and it was so busy, that the four of us didn't eat until everyone else was done (of course grandma ate with everyone else, she was a big reason why they came).
It continued like that up until the last day we were there. We had different people coming to the house to eat, and we were going to different people's houses (or restaurants) to eat. Every time a new car of people showed up, we would set off a big long string of firecrackers, and every time we showed up at someone's house, we would be greeted the same way. Of course I personally was greeted at every house by hi Emma, here eat some hongshaorou, and I just replied by smiling and thinking "you are my favorite person in the world today".
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| the view from the second floor. not much to see in the winter |
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| two big tables, ready to party! That little red bucket down there is where grandma keep her little pet turtle. I think he was enjoying some sun at the time. |
When we left, we were given a lot of nice gifts (mostly food) from Hui's parents to take back to Hangzhou with us. They gave us a ton of home made pumpkin seeds, some dried duck, pork and tofu sausages, and some dried salty fish. Hui's uncle also gave me a really nice tea box filled with some really nice tea. It made me so happy, it was so thoughtful of him! I really loved my time during the spring festival. It was actually a lot of work, and not all play, but I enjoyed both the work and the play, and I just loved being around Hui's warm and wonderful family. I can't wait to go back next time.
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| our lovely pumpkin seeds |
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| the tea box from Hui's uncle |
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