So, it's Friday night here, and I leave early Sunday morning. It feels somewhat surreal to have everything packed up and cleaned and to be looking at leaving. These next couple posts are going to come in rapid succession within the upcoming few days. I'm going to try to break them up into events, so they're easier to read about than one long post.

A team stretching prior to racing.

First off: Dragon Boat Festival. This year, Dragon Boat Festival fell on the weekend of June 8. Although I was not participating in the Dragon Boat races themselves (practices were 6am weekday mornings), many of my friends were, which prompted me to go to the races early Saturday morning. They were excellent! Although the foreigners' team (organized by the university where we took Chinese classes) lost to the second team they raced (they totally won the first!), it was a really great thing to see, and a really wonderful experience. I loved cheering them on.

Starting off...

My friend, Jenny, really putting her all into it.

Success!

Way to win!

Dragon Boat Festival was one of the only Chinese holidays that I had to teach about in my English class. We touched briefly on the Moon Festival (see October for a memory booster), but this was the one that we went into more depth on, at least with the first and second graders. It was also the first time I ran into the problem of "Well, we just don't have that word in English, so we use the Chinese word..." This really threw my younger students off. The example: For the Dragon Boat Festival, people eat these triangle glutinous rice dumplings, wrapped in bamboo leaves (see the story below for more details on why). In Chinese, they're called zhong zi. However, there's not really an English translation of that word, and on the poster we had for the Dragon Boat Festival, they just labeled them as "zhong zi." Needless to say, my students were throughly confused, and every time I pointed to the picture, had no clue what to say, despite me coaching "What do you call them in Chinese?"

So, the story of the Dragon Boat Festival: the festival commemorates the death of Qu Yuan, who was a famous poet from the kingdom of Chu. He was extremely patriotic, and tried to warn the king and his fellow country men about the expansion of the Qin (this was during the Warring states period). This resulted in exile. When the Qin, in fact, took over the capital of Chu, Qu Yuan was so upset that he drowned himself in the river. The story goes that the local people threw packets of rice into the river so the fish would not eat his body. If you're interested, there's also a fable about a snake: White Snake story.

Besides zhong zi and boat racing, the holiday also includes hanging up medicinal herbs and using sweet smelling sachets, since it's believed that it's easier to get sick this time of year (makes sense, since, as I've experienced, the humidity and heat is overwhelming). Also, you're supposed to be able to stand up eggs on their ends at 12 noon on the day of the dragon boat festival. Apparently it is for good luck, and the ability to stand them has something to do with the pull of the earth? I wasn't able to do it, but then again, I tried at 1:00...