Today has started the year of the Rabbit according to many Asian cultures, so I want to wish you all a great new lunar year! I hope it will bring you all luck, success, fun, money, good health, quality time with the people you love, sex (hopefully a quality one, too), and whatever you dream of having.
You know that this has been the first year I’ve actually celebrated the Chinese new year in China, so I want to take this occasion to tell you how has been my experience. So yes, today I won’t speak with you about fields of view or frames per second, but about fun and food… which are much more interesting. The life of the travel blogger is much more enjoyable than the one of the VR blogger, maybe I should consider changing my profession 🙂
Before telling you about my experience I just want to clarify that China is an enormous and heterogeneous country, so the experience I lived may differ from the one of other people you know in the country. I am in Qingdao, which is on the East side of the country, also quite on the North, and I’m sure that things in other cities like Shenzhen, which is in the far South, may not be totally the same. So don’t take my experience as an example of what happens in the whole China… it is just my experience.
My expectations for the Chinese New Year celebrations were the same that years of American movies gave me. In many movies, the main characters find themselves in the China Town of some big American metropolitan city, at the moment when there are celebrations for the new year. And in these sequences, I could always see many people cheering in the streets while there were a lot of red lanterns in the sky and performers creating long dragons that move around, while some ritual songs play in the background. I was especially curious to see the dragons’ show. And I’m still curious because nothing of this happened.
The celebrations here have been much different than I expected. First of all, I understood that most of the time, it is just about spending some quality time with the people of your family. It is not about partying hard, or things like that, it is more about returning home, preparing the celebrations with your family, cooking with them, eating with them, and just enjoying your personal connections. It is not even about doing crazy things with your family, like bungee jumping, it is just about being together. It’s a bit like Christmas for us Italians: you stay with your beloved ones, you eat a lot, and you make gifts to each other. I gifted some good food to my hosts, and they gifted me back the lovely rabbit toy that you see in the profile picture. And exactly like in our Christmas, public activities are not super important. I asked about the dragons’ show and I’ve been told that sometimes the city of Qingdao organizes some public events for the new year, but it’s not every year, and usually, dragons don’t play a relevant role here. Damn, this shattered my dreams.
Then, I got that food is very important, too. When I arrived at the house in the early afternoon, the parents of the family started to make me taste some Chinese food that is usually not available abroad. I know a bit of Chinese, but I’m not skilled enough to be able to sustain a whole family conversation, so wherever I didn’t know what to say, I just ate stuff. Since they spoke a lot, and I understood very little, I just spent the whole afternoon eating a lot. I had already eaten enough when then dinner was ready, and it was full of delicious homemade Chinese food, that I ate until my stomach was exploding. While I was recovering from this effort, someone asked me “Do you want some sweeties?”. I was literally exploding, but I’m Italian, and I can’t say no when someone offers me some sweet food. So I used my secondary stomach dedicated to desserts to eat some wonderful cakes.
I was literally like a pufferfish, laying on the sofa with my two stomachs exploding when the daughter of the family told me “now we make dumplings”.
No, seriously, I wanted to invoke the Geneva convention to avoid preparing the dumplings. But it’s a traditional thing of the families of Northern China, and saying no would be pretty offensive, so I helped them in making the dumplings. I hoped that we could just make them and leave them on the table like decoration, but the steps after have been cooking them and eating them. I’ve so been given a full dish of meat dumplings, which were wonderful. Yesterday I’ve so discovered that I’ve also a third stomach dedicated to dumplings. Which is a good thing and could prove to still be useful in the future.
Back to the sofa, I thought that all the food I ate that day could be used to solve world hunger. And after a while, I received a new question: “Do you want to eat some fruit?”.
Turns out to be that the only dragons I saw were the ones in my intestines for the whole night.
Another thing that struck me was the fireworks. The whole evening there were people exploding firecrackers, fireworks, and other similar stuff, in all parts of the city. Looking outside the window, I could see that in whatever direction I looked, there was someone in that part of the city exploding something. We also fire up stuff to celebrate the new year in Italy, but this was at another level: fireworks everywhere, the whole night. When I went outside to light some sparkles myself too (to avoid eating for 10 minutes), there was a constant noise of explosions… it was like being in a warzone. I’ve been told that actually, the level of fireworks was still underwhelming if compared to five years ago… and if that is underwhelming, I can’t imagine the bombings happening in the past. I’ve been told that making explosions is a traditional thing to repel evil spirits for the new year, so it’s all part of the celebrations.
Something I wasn’t absolutely expecting was the people turning on fires in the sides of the street and burning a special kind of paper to remember their ancestors and send some sort of gifts to them. There is a special day dedicated to this celebration, but many people here were still doing this ritual on the New Year’s Eve because it’s a very important day. I’ve not taken a picture to not disrespect this intimate moment, but it was anyway something pretty unique for me to see, especially because the taxi that returned me home had to dodge a few of them.
The TV was set on CCTV 1, which is the main television Channel here. There was a TV show dedicated to the new year, with some fun sketches, some traditional songs, and ballets. The problem is that it’s already hard for me to understand Chinese, and this show didn’t even have subtitles, so I was like totally lost. I looked at the images most of the time, but even here I did spot no dragons. Damn, they really wanted to make it hard for me. But in the whole show, I managed to get one joke, so at least I had a laugh. This was a net positive, because I’m afraid that laughing too much my belly could explode, so not understanding anything saved my life. In Italy when we celebrate the solar new year, we usually have a counter of the time all the time displayed on the screen, but it turns out that on the CCTV show they start counting down only when it’s -10 seconds from midnight. I was totally chill when OHMYGODITS10SECONDSNOWWEHAVETOMAKEATOAST. It was like when firefighters hear the bell and they have to rush and go to extinguish some fire. Emergency mode activated: I had to prepare immediately to celebrate.
At midnight I had a little cheer. I decided to taste the Chinese baijiu liquor, which I was told in the past by some friends of mine that tastes like gasoline. Drinking a sip of a bottle of it bought at the supermarket, I can confirm that it tastes like gasoline, and considering the price of the fuel nowadays in Italy, I think we should consider it as a valid substitute to put in our cars.
At the end of day, I can tell you that spending the lunar new year here was a pleasant experience. Totally different from the one I expected, it was more personal and intimate than one of crazy fun, but I feel happy of having lived it. And with this warmth in my heart, I wish you again a wonderful new Chinese year and a happy Sunday! And I hope you will see some dragons, too…