Chinese New Year (Spring Festival)

Chinese New Year (The Spring Festival)

February 14th was the start of the Chinese New Year or Spring Festival. It is a two week long celebration of the new lunar year where family’s come together from all over the country to celebrate with each other and wish each other wealth, and longevity in the New Year. The holiday is a very family oriented one unlike our new year where people celebrate with friends CNY is celebrated at home with the family. I spoke with my professors to ask them what the traditional New Year is like in their homes. From what I could gather from the Chinglish conversations I had was that the families will gather together and watch CNY television programs (probably not Dick Clarke’s Rockin’ New Year’s Eve but the same idea) and eat a dinner together that will last late into the night. Generally families will eat a fish course followed by dumplings around midnight (which are supposed to bring wealth in the New Year) and then a dessert of cake before bed. As most of this is done at home there isn’t much for a foreigner to participate in or to witness. The biggest aspect of CNY that a foreigner gets to witness is the attempt to blow up the city with fireworks and last year they were more successful than this year as the CCTV headquarters was burned to the ground as a result of the excessive amount of fireworks (this building was about 2 miles due south of my apartment (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/02/09/cctv-building-on-fire-ico_n_165186.html). This year the fireworks were still shot off in full force but without the destruction.
I can say that I have never seen and will probably never see the skies light up like that ever again. Having witnessed on the news the live shots from war torn countries, Beijing on and around CNY could easily be confused with a combat zone. Starting most days during the two weeks of Spring Festival the sounds started and continued on well past midnight on most nights. People would be in the streets, on the sidewalks, behind apartment buildings and everywhere they could find a few feet to blow something up. On our way to Drum and Bell (a roof top bar that sits right between the Drum and Bell Towers with a great view around the city) on CNY our cab suddenly stopped I looked up to see the road in front of us exploding fireworks were being shot off in every direction imaginable from the center of the road. This wasn’t on a side street either this was in the middle of a 6 lane road that acts as a central artery running east and west through the city. For over 5 minutes the road continued to explode and then it stopped suddenly and we began to move as we drove by you could see in the road trash everywhere, red paper and cardboard littering the road and sidewalks where the fireworks had been. Once we arrived at the Drum and Bell I made my way upstairs where for a couple hours I watched a seemingly endless amount of fireworks be shot off throughout the city. I have uploaded a video to youtube that shows what this is like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSOPGNNyS3c .