Dinner with the folks

I've been feeling a bit sick these past few days. Must have caught something while I on that 23 hour train ride. Despite the coughing and sniffling, I have been taking my mom to some of the touristy places in Chengdu. I'm in the process of charging my camera so that I can transfer pictures over for posting. So, I'll talk about those trips in another blog.

Sarah and her family came back from Tibet this evening and so we decided to have a gathering of families for dinner. We (Sarah and her family, Laura and her mom, Matt, and my mom and I) went to that mapo tofu place we ate previously during the mid-autumn festival. It was nice to see everyone again and even better that we got to meet everyone's family. We had the traditonal family style Chinese dinner - a plate of stir-fried bean sprouts, mapo tofu *of course!*, fish sauced egg plant, kongbao chicken, huiguo rou or twice cooked pork, winter melon dakon pork soup, fish (nian nian you yu), and pineapple flavored bing & scallion flavored bing (cong you bing). All of us shared stories about our adventures. Laura and Sarah also have blogs that I have linked with mine. Check out their adventures! Laura spent some time in Beijing and in Shanghai and Sarah and her family was in Beijing for a few days before coming to Chengdu and taking the train to Lhasa.

Chinese New Year Festivities in Chengdu

There is a word in Chinese that, when translated into English, sort of loses its meaning. That's because it has to be understood in context - mostly a cultural and experimental context. 热闹 or renao is when translated is literally "hot noisy." For the Chinese, this means crowded, noisy, and busy. People sometimes mistaken this to be a negative term, but let me tell you, Chinese people love renao.
Today is the 2nd day of the spring festival. Last night, my mom and I went over to Matt's place and cooked a "traditional" Chinese dinner. It's really hard to get authentic when all of the vegetable markets are closed, but we tried our best. We wanted to make 饺子or dumplings but because the market wasn't open for the holidays, we had to buy frozen ones instead of buying the dough and making our own. Besides dumplings, we had roasted duck and chicken, soy bean curd, Chinese sausages, and a soup of all sorts of seafood and meat balls - shrimp balls, fish balls, pork balls, fake crab meat (the pink and white stuff). All while eating, we were watching re-runs of CCTV's annual spring festival program. In the middle of watching an old Chinese movie called "The Knot," all hell broke lose with fireworks. And not with those ones that you would buy in the America at those stands outside of supermarkets. These were like the ones you would see at firework shows - right at eye-level outside of Matt's 6th floor apartment. Crazy! On our way home, I spotted some local, small vendors with carts of fireworks. Tonight is going to be a night of pyro-mania. And they are hella cheap too!

This morning, my mom and I headed down to Wen Shu Yuan, this temple in the middle of Chengdu. Growing up in LA and having attended all of these Chinese New Year Festivities as a kid, it was pure heaven. Renao and tons of it. So many kinds of 小吃 or little foods!!! Let's see if I can recount all of them: fried squid, Tibetan butter tea, fresh sugarcane juice, mala tofu flower, baked goods, dragon whisker candy, mud roasted chicken, stinky tofu, etc. There was just too much for my stomach to take it all! Besides the ones already listed, there was deer meat, fresh coconut, cold noodles, 5 friend quail eggs on a stick, insects (like grasshoppers, scorpions, bee/jacket larvae, beetles, etc) on a stick, all sorts of bean mixtures, etc. Man! You have got to love China during the holidays. People here sure do.

Happy Lunar New Year!

It's five minutes till the New Year and outside my window...it's absolutely chaotic! Everywhere, there are fireworks and firecrackers going off. If you didn't know where you were...you would think you were stuck somewhere where warfare was going on. There is non-stop blasting of reds, yellows, greens, and blues. On occasion, haha...like right now, there are those gigantic fireball fireworks that give off that loud boom and bright glow. So this is how people in Chengdu celebrate their new year! My mom and I have been in Yunnan for the past nine days. We finally arrived back in Chengdu this evening...after a twenty-three train ride from Kunming. We missed the last stretch of people buying last minute groceries. We did catch a couple of small shops so we bought some sunflower seeds (500 grams to be exact), some chicken wings, 3 apples for peace, 2 pears, and some oranges with their stems and leaves still attached. Lol...it's hard to sleep at all right now. Everywhere, people are lighting fireworks like crazy! The sky is constantly aglow and the night setting is filled with squeels from fireworks and crackles from the firecrackers. If only I was more eloquent in my description or if there was a way for me to record this and have this be played back...haha. Let me tell you though...it's a great way to usher in the new year thats for sure. This probably won't be the end of it. New Years lasts for fifteen days! Without all of the vegetables and such, I made some thousand year old eggs and salted duck egg congee and my mom and I had that with the chicken wings and bean curds. The fireworks started way early...when we were eating dinner. The sad part of it all is...we don't have a tv in our apartment. My friend David (Zeng Yu) gave me a link, though, to watch what was probably the most watched television broadcast in the world of Chinese people - CCTV's annual New Years program. Streaming over our internet live was sort of a pain...so I'm going to see if watching it tomorrow morning would be a better bet. I'll try to fill in the details later about our trip within the next few weeks. I think I'm going to go and step outside and try to see if I can catch more of this excitement!
Happy Lunar New Year Everyone!!!
It's the year of the PIG. :)
新年快乐！！！