Dinner on 5th Day of the New Year

30.1.2009 von Ines.

In the Chinese New Year the first few days are counted and have special meanings. The fifth day of the New Year is called “Chu 5″ or in full Chinese “Chu Wu” (as wu means 5). This day you should spend it with your family and eat jiaozi, the dumplings boiled in water. If you do not have jiaozi you will have bad luck, or something like that. We spent this night with Chinese friends who cooked a great dinner including the jiaozi. And then we had to fire some fire crackers as this fifth day needs to be celebrated with a lot of noise. So instead of going down we just lit the fire crackers from the window of the apartment.

I almost had forgotten the nice sentence: “Xiao jie, yi wan shui jiao duo shao qian”. If you pronounce it one way it means: “Waitress, how much for a bowl of jiaozi?” Another way to pronounce it means “Lady, how much for a night?”. It is a funny sentence you can teach a foreigner learning Chinese and let him ask the waitress in a restaurant and the probability is high that he anyway will accidentally pronounce the second way which is funny for all capable of Chinese, especially the Chinese themselves.

Echo had accidentally cut her finger cap on New Years Eve while helping her mother prepare the big dinner. Now she currently cannot climb. I hope it heals fast.

As it is the Year of the Ox everybody likes playing around with bullhorns or anything that looks like it.

Well it did get a bit silly. Here is the link to the webalbum with all the pictures of the night.

The two foreigners started playing a game of Chinese Chess as we were nibbling sunflower and pumpkin seeds.

When we were leaving I was shocked to see my bike standing in a huge sea of fire cracker waste. They must have been placing the fire crackers just everywhere around my bike. My bike must have been so scared with all the noise and not able to run away…

Geschrieben in China, Beijing | Keine Kommentare »