Spending Chinese New Year in Beijing ~ Jennifer

Spending Chinese New Year in Beijing

1:17 PM Jlu17

During the weeks preceding and following Chinese New Year ("chunjie, 春节"), the Beijing streets are heavily decorated with everything red -- red lanterns, red envelopes, red banners, etc. Half of the stores are closed because the store owners are also celebrating. Many of the small shop owners are actually part of the large migrant population ("liudong renkou, 流动人口"), so they close their shops to return to their families outside of Beijing. I could no longer order delivery from one of my favorite small restaurants, 西安小吃, because the owner wanted to return to her family in Xi'an halfway across China. However, the traffic also gets better as the Beijing population travels outside of Beijing, and by the day before Chinese New Year, I was able to freely bike wherever I wanted.

This year, Chinese New Year coincidentally fell the day after my birthday, so I had the privilege of pretending that Beijing was celebrating my birthday. One of my cousins who lived in Beijing decided to take me ice skating over the (what I think is artificially) frozen pond in Houhai (后海). I finally learned how to ice skate in Beijing.

Also, my friend and I decided to explore Beijing a little more the week before chunjie. Everything was red, and all of the temples were filled with people sending their last prayers before heading home.

Even Sanlitun, the most foreign part of Beijing, was decorated with lanterns.

My birthday was the same day as the New Year's Eve (chuxi, "除夕"). Two former SYA students (one who was also a Poly alum who had the same host family as me) decided to join my host family to celebrate. We ate a lot of food and played too much mahjong ("麻将").

We didn't set off any firecrackers ourselves, but there were plenty of fireworks being set off around us that we didn't miss out. A kid set off a small firecracker next to my foot, but luckily it was too small to do damage. There were larger, much more dangerous firecrackers that hurt people, but I didn't see that happen on my relatively quiet residential street.

This was around 1 am, when most people already finished setting off firecrackers. There were still enthusiastic stragglers.

Chunjie doesn't end when New Year's Day is over. There is still a week of "temple fairs", for lack of a better word ("miaohui, 庙会"). Different parks in Beijing host fairs everyday filled with food and activities. There are usually way too many people at each fair. There were basically seas of people flooding the fairs every day (人山人海, which means mountains and seas of people). My friends and I spent a lot of money trying different foods.

Lamb skewers are always a crowd favorite, so the crowds are often densest around these stands.

We visited around 4-5 different 庙会s. They were usually held at parks, and some parks simultaneously held both a 庙会 and an ice skating rink.

Literally a sea of people stopping traffic to enter the miaohui.

Some places had "ceremonies", where Chinese people would pay a lot of money to be serenaded by people in costumes. It was mostly for show, so while the crowds were huge, the actual number of customers were scarce.