Happy Chinese New Year!!!

February 13th starts the Lunar year in the Chinese calendar and therefore is the true New Year celebration (after all 1.3 billion people can’t be wrong). I’ll start by saying that for many Expats in China, the New Year holiday (aka Spring Festival) is a time to get out of Dodge, for some of us…we stay behind because we don’t have the option to go and take a holiday in another part of the world. For the Chinese, it’s time to head to their home towns and be with family for the holiday. It’s a travel industries dream come true (this is called Chunyun and it’s the largest “human migration” in the world, the numbers of people that travel during this time are unbelievable). Leading up to the holiday, you see the places that sell train tickets with a long line of people waiting to get a chance to purchase their tickets to go home. In China you can’t buy tickets prior to 10 days before you travel so when everyone wants to go home on Friday the 12th….well, now you can imagine the lines of people at the ticket counter on the 2nd. I guess the closest thing we might have is the lines at the DMV. Last weekend as we walked down Walking Street, we saw lines of 300+ people at two separate ticket offices waiting to get their tickets and of course hoping that there are tickets available. Since the majority of people do not own a car they purchase train tickets and bus tickets to get them home. Some have to travel as many as 14 hours by bus to get home (that’s the longest trip I’ve heard for people at work, I’m sure others travel even farther). Even then, they are still left to pick up a cab or local bus from their drop-off point to get them home. It’s just something they do and they don’t seem to complain, they’ve grown up with it and it is what it is. So anyhow, traveling around China during this time is a trying task so this is why many get out of the country. They can’t go to see the sights so rather than stay inside their apartments, they get out. Anyhow, we stayed in Suzhou to see what all the fuss is about.
At one of our favorite spots, Casa Zoe’s, they were holding a 100 RMB all you can eat and drink traditional Chinese dinner on Saturday night. We decided to give it a try since many of the local establishments close due to the lack of employees (and owners) but Casa was open and will remain open during the entire festival period. The manager Lena told us about it a couple of weeks back and we decided to give it a shot since the dining options are limited as I explained (of course, we could eat at home but we usually eat out on Fridays and Saturdays so we stick to our routine like good anal retentive folks). Warren really likes dumplings (or spaghetti, or pizza, or chicken cordon blue or…you get the point) and we know he can eat 100 RMB worth of them (for all of us). We get to Casa about 6:15 or so and they have two people sitting behind a table making dumplings from all the fixins they have around them. They allow us to sit down with them and learn how the pros do it (they used chopsticks to fill the skins and everything else). Tammy and Warren sit and learn how to make the dumplings while Jacob and I take a look at the other stuff. Thankfully for Jacob, there was chicken nuggets, fries and pizza for those Expat children that don’t eat dumplings (hmmm, sounds like Jacob). He got his plate full and headed back to the table while Tammy and I took a look at the other eats while our dumplings went into the water. What’s on the menu you ask….you sure you want to know? Here goes, dumplings (well duh!, pork and beef filled), chicken feet, pig’s tongue, pig’s ear (two different slices, one thin slice and the other a thicker slice of the ear) and pig’s tail (and no it didn’t look like curly fries). The reason for the pig’s tongue and tail is that it represents the end of one year and the beginning of another year (this can also be done with chickens but Casa used pigs). This is on the near table. On the far table is a hot pot option (for those that don’t know, you get what you want and place it in the hot liquid to cook before you eat it). In the hot pot (which smelled very, very spicy, you could see all of the peppers and other stuff floating around) you had several options to put into the hot liquid to cook. These were a little more “advanced Chinese” options. Pig’s stomach lining, chicken intestines, pig’s brain (this is your brain on drugs, this is a pigs brain in a bowl), squid and another meat option that she never explained to us except to say “You won’t like that”. Still more meat options were liver (I think it was liver but I’m not sure from what animal), small hot dog looking things, Chinese sausage and the fake crab meat (lump crab). There were also veggie options for the hot pot, lotus root, mushrooms and potatoes. We looked and considered the hot pot (we like spicy) but we’re still on the “elementary Chinese” menu (if we’ve seen it on the menu in the US, we can eat it, sweet and sour chicken, kung pao chicken, etc.).
So we ate the dumplings (and ate the dumplings) and drank the beer and had a good time. We also tried the pig’s ear, pig’s tongue and pig’s tail. The pig’s ear is different since it’s got the cartilage contained in the very thinly sliced portion but it’s not all bad. A little chewy without too much flavor save what you dip it in or what it is pickled in. The tongue and tail tasted like….pork (really?!? Yes, pig tastes like pig. Of course I resisted the urge to say “Be-beh, Be-beh, Be-Beh, that’s all folks” after eating the tongue). We ate dinner with another Expat family and the 7 of us were the only foreigners in the place. Casa held the dinner more for their employees that could not make it home for the holiday and opened their doors to any customers that might wander in to have dinner. Their menu was suspended for the evening and so it was the Chinese menu or nothing. So we sat at a large group of tables and after about 7:15, here come the employees out to the dinner table to grab some food and a drink and then look to the big screen to watch TV. They were all over the hotpot, it was like Wal-Mart on Black Friday (or so I’ve been told by those that have to be there to get the sales) people pulling the intestines out of the bowl to dump in the hot pot to cook. MMMmmmm, hot pot chicken intestines. They seemed to enjoy them so it’s okay by me, nothing went to waste. Now I was told that from 8:00 – 12:00, you can watch CCTV and watch the New Year’s show. It’s like their version of Dick Clark’s New Year’s show. They had performances from singers, acrobats, and some more odd performances like small children going on stage to show how smart they are (when we got home, we watched more of the show and since the channel we watched was translated, it was very interesting to know the lyrics to the songs they were singing. There was a lot of national pride mixed in with the celebration that wasn’t over the top but just something different from listening to some of the banter from the US New Year’s shows). So basically, they eat, drink and watch TV with family (I never realized that I was Chinese since these are some of my favorite things to do), similar to the US Thanksgiving. Lena indicated to us that since we were there for the New Year, we were now part of the family (look everyone; we’ve adopted some white people…aren’t they cute). We were toasted several times by the workers and had a great time with them. It was a surreal experience since we never really would ever see the people behind the scenes and now we were sitting at the same table enjoying the show (or laughing as Warren kept having issues with his chopsticks and couldn’t seem to hold on to his dumpling).
Happy New Year in Chinese is Xin Nian Kuai Le (pronounced like She-en Ne-en Kwhy Luh) and we said it all night to them and they said it to us. Tammy spent the whole evening saying Happy New Year to everyone we met, like the American Chinese New Year ambassador (to the taxi drivers, the people on the street, the security guards at the apartment complex, etc.), it was funny. About 8:30, we got dressed to head back home. Did I mention how cold it is outside? It was really c-c-c-cold here the past several days. It wasn’t just the temp. but the wind chill. We got some sleet on Thursday morning and it never got better from that, the temperature kept dropping and the wind kept picking up. We may have lived in the South but we still remembered our childhood in the Northern part of the country (damned Yankee) and we know how to layer to keep warm but with the wind, there just isn’t much you can do.
On the walk home (despite the cold, we wanted to see what was happening), it was a fireworks extravaganza! Everywhere you looked, there were fireworks going off. These weren’t your run-of-the-mill fireworks either. Huge mortars setting off the large fireworks displays on the left, then on the right, down the street that way, don’t miss those ones over there. I mean this was like the 4th of July and New Years kicked up a notch since anyone and everyone can buy the fireworks and they do. It wasn’t one large show; it was one show here, one show there, all by individuals. The fireworks were the boxes that you find at Crazy Willys and places just across the GA border that would cost you a lot of cash to get (you know the boxes with 30+ mortars and much, much more). Don’t get me wrong, there were also fireworks from the city that took place at dusk and midnight but all of the rest, those may have been a business but either way, anyone could set them off. AND they would set them off from anywhere. Off the 11th floor balcony at the apartment, check. Right outside the entrance to the complex, check. Right next to the building, check. Bouncing off the building, check. I have to emphasize that these weren’t just a few bottle rockets and whirly things, these were the big bangers so there was nothing subdued about the celebration. No matter which way you looked, you would see something within a few moments. It was also interesting to see how empty the streets were for a Saturday night. Everyone was indoors watching the show with the exception of a few foreigners and Chinese that had their own celebration & fireworks. So why not a couple of Expats???
Yes, we purchased some fireworks (when in China); a string of 10,000 firecrackers (yes, 10,000 firecrackers), some small tanks, some of the small mortars, roman candles, flaming showers and several other types of fireworks. Despite a few issues with getting the darned things lit (Tip #1 – always be sure to have a decent lighter BEFORE you go outside in the freezing cold to light off fireworks) we were able to set them off and feel a part of the whole Chinese New Year tradition. We learned that you can light other fireworks with the roman candles (probably not recommended but I’ll be darned if it didn’t work) and that it takes a long time for a string of 10,000 firecrackers to finish (WHAT!?! and it also affects your hearing just a little). Afterwards, we watched more of the CCTV celebration until it was about 11:15. We headed to bed hearing the fireworks going off for the next hour or so until we fell asleep. The kids slept through it no problem which surprised us but we were glad that we didn’t have any issues from them. We woke up the next morning to that beautiful sound of fireworks going off somewhere nearby and they would continue to go off sporadically throughout the day. Was there a purpose to all of this? Of course there is but rather than re-hash the information, you can find out for yourself at this address; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_New_Year. In the meantime, Happy Chinese New Year to all of you back home!