Auld Lang Sine

Spring Festival is a BIG deal here…people know it…
The local people liken it to Christmas in the west (before it became all commercialized and “Happy Holidays”), to give you an idea of its importance. EVERYTHING shuts down and what doesn’t shut down is scaled WAY back. I would liken it more to a combination between Thanksgiving and Fourth of July. The important celebration for this holiday is eating and fireworks.

I was eagerly looking forward to my first Spring Festival here to see the country in all of its splendor as it prepared for its finest, most important of all festivals. My friends were also looking forward to it and we had made plans to meet early on Spring Festival morning in the main square to watch the parade. Sadly, we found out just days before that there was not going to be a parade, or any other festivities formally put on by the city. We were bummed!

Fortunately, I was invited by one of my local friends to celebrate Spring Festival Eve with her and her family. I arrived at 6, and had been told that dinner would be ready around 7. I talked with her son and her nephew, both of whom I had previous met. Dinner was served and I was seated next to my friend.

**If you have a rather squeamish stomach, you may want to skip this section**

The meal began with being served pig tongue. The pig tongue is supposed to bring you wealth. (I had a brief, but intense discussion with my father about being able to graciously receive and eat the meat and many petitions were made that I might avoid seeing it again during a make out session with my toilet.) We then moved on to cabbage, which is never cut on Spring Festival because it represents long life. I found these two instances of the meal to be similar to our southern New Year’s dinner of ham and collards. There were many, many other dishes to try, so many in fact that they wouldn’t all fit on the table and there was hardly any room for our own dishes. Some of the “highlights” of the meal – other than the pig tongue – included crab, shrimp, fish, egg rolls (not like our eggrolls), soup, and some strange brown, hairy looking thing. I’ll describe them each in turn:

• The crab is not like the crab that I am familiar with from crabbing in the sound at the beach all throughout my childhood. These crabs were small and from a lake. I took one look at the crab and thought, “What am I supposed to do with this?” The legs were so small it was hardly worth the trouble to cracking them open (with my teeth) to get the meat. After all of my labors, they found that I had missed the “best” part – the body of the crab. (Side note: Upon our first summer crab feast at the beach, I tried to eat the inside of the crab, but upon an unsavory experience with a gooey, green part I have given up eating the body entirely!) I was assured that this was the MOST delicious and most expensive part of the crab and that I simply had to try it. Timidly, I popped open the crab and was instructed on which part to eat. It was a part that I have never seen in a crab before, the ORANGE part. It really did not seem to have much flavor to me, but the consistency of it was similar to the yolk of a hard-boiled egg. As this was a hard-boiled crab, I imagine that while the crab is still living/fresh, the ORANGE part is similar in consistency with the yolk of an uncooked egg. Upon further research via the ever-reliable Wikipedia, I found out that these crabs are prized for their roe, so perhaps that was what I ate.

• The shrimp weren’t really much to write home about – simple, boiled shrimp, except these still had their heads, legs, and tails

• Again, the fish wasn’t much to write home about. It looked similar to a flounder, but I’m not sure that that’s exactly what it was. I was asked to “carve” the fish, which really just meant separating the meat from the spine because the others at the table were not familiar with how to use a fork

• The egg rolls were not eggrolls. These were very thin strips of scrambled egg rolled into spirals and formed into a dome shape. I have had them before, but they always look so odd that I get a sense of fear every time I see them on the table.

• The soup was quite good. I was a crab soup, except there was a whole crab in the pot, not crabmeat. The soup was like drinking drawn butter. The whole time I kept thinking of all those times when I used to get in trouble to eating a stick of butter and here I was having butter soup!

• The brown, hairy looking thing – a good description. I might liken its appearance to the gumballs that fall of the trees in the fall. I assume the brown, hairy things on the outside were a kind of tea and on the inside was a meatball sort of thing. It was rather tasty.

**You can recommence your reading here**

After dinner, we went outside to set of fireworks. (By the way, the fireworks last for over a week. During the Spring Festival week, I went to bed by the sounds of fireworks, woke up to fireworks, and heard them throughout the day. It was what I imagine it might be like to live in a war zone because these fireworks are so loud that it sounds like gunfire/cannon fire.) Most of you live in a state where fireworks are illegal or only little Roman candle type of fireworks are allowed. There are no such restrictions here. We were lighting “Roman candles”, but these Roman candles were in a long bamboo (?) tube that you HELD IN YOUR HAND! Knowing the likelihood of these to blow up or misfire made me a little skittish about holding a tube full of gunpowder in my hand while it was ignited and launched out. I became extremely wary after I saw one actually blowup in my friend’s brother’s hands. I was worried that he was going to be missing some fingers; thankfully, he still had 8 of them…j/k he had all 10! Some other people in my friend’s apartment complex were launching the big shell fireworks, like the ones we see at the fairgrounds, OFF OF THEIR BALCONY! It was rather intense, and upon returning inside, I felt my blood pressure drop by about 10 points.

All in all, I was a little disappointed by the fanfare of Spring Festival here, but it was a great experience to have and I am thankful to my friend for sharing it with me.