A breath of fresh air

The Chinese New Year season is finally over! Yesterday (Monday the ninth) was the 15th day of the first month on the lunar calendar, so it was Yuanxiao Jie. Literally translated, that's the Sweet dumplings made of glutinous rice flour holiday, but it's usually translated as the Lantern Festival.  Why they don't call it the Lantern Festival in Chinese, I don't know. Maybe just to confuse people. 

The good news is that the fireworks of the Spring Festival are only legal through the night of the Lantern Festival.  Finally, the fireworks have stopped! Admittedly, though, last night was a lot of fun again, to see all the leftover fireworks going off. I had a perfect view from my window of some place that was lighting off huge fireworks for literally three and a half hours straight! I had no idea it was possible to buy that many fireworks!

It was actually about 5 p.m. yesterday before I remembered that it was the Lantern Festival (since it's really an after-dark sort of holiday). Unfortunately, I went out about 5 to run some errands, not realizing everything was going to be closing early. So of my five errands, I only accomplished one. Oh well. On the bright side, I had fun walking back from a large grocery store through some alleyways and housing areas. I'm probably a lot closer to deaf now because of it, but it was fun to see all the firecrackers being set off by individual families and complexes. Actually, if any of you are at all afraid of fireworks, I don't recommend walking through alleys and housing areas in China during the Spring Festival. I'm not afraid of them usually, but I was a bit nervous yesterday. I knew I should start being worried when I saw people walking around outside wearing hard hats! Not because they were construction workers; just because of the fireworks. 

At one point, I walked by two middle-aged Chinese men who were out with sparklers. Now these sparklers are not the short little sparklers we have in the U.S. No, these were more than a meter long each! The gentlemen were amazed to see a foreigner walking by, so they had me join them. I had fun playing with the sparklers! It was just a little awkward after they were all done, though, when the guys asked me to join them going home. Um, no. That didn't seem like such a good idea!

After returning home (having avoided that invitation as graciously as I could, which wasn't particularly graciously at all), I celebrated myself by making some yuanxiao (that's the sweet dumplings made of glutinous rice flour that the holiday is named for). They're really easy to make: you buy a bag of frozen ones and the grocery store and then boil them for five minutes. Then you eat them. Easy. I had fun buying them, too, because I didn't know all the terms for the different filling options. So I ended up picking up two that I knew I would like (black sesame paste filling and peanut filling), and then I asked an employee at the store which of the other two options she prefers. So I took that one. Turns out it's "kernels." I don't know what kind of kernels, but it's tasty anyway. 

So that was my Lantern Festival. I managed to celebrate the Lantern Festival without ever seeing a lantern, but that's okay. I ate the sweet dumplings and I played with sparklers with creepy middle-aged Chinese men. Hehe. (Hey, I got away as soon as it started getting sketchy.)

It's definitely been a breath of fresh air to not have fireworks and firecrackers going nonstop.  But I'm looking forward to the day I can take a real breath of fresh air… sometime after the wind blows all these gunpowder-packed air molecules away.