Zhou Dynasty

It's been almost 12 years since I spent my last CNY in China. Things have definately changed since I was last here for this all important holiday. The display of fireworks is prohibited in most major cities, even the government doesn't light it up, what a shame. Spending the CNY here I did learn more about the Chinese traditions, I thought my knowledge on this subject was quite extensive before but I had forgotten about all the little weird rules. One of the rules is that before new years, you can clean your house, but the day AFTER new years (today), you can't clean your house no matter what, sweeping the floor is especially prohibited. The reasoning is that if you do this, you'll be sweeping away all the good luck for 2006. If you borrowed money from someone in 2005, you must return it to them before new years or that person will have the bad luck of being owed money in all of 2006. There are always a bunch of crazy little Chinese customs that revolve around a certain holiday. Today Amanda and I went to Nan Pu Tuo, a buddhist temple, to pray to the buddhas for the new year. I couldn't believe how many people were there. The traffic jam was so bad that our cab driver tried different routes before we eventually ended up abandoning the cab on a highway and just walking the rest of the way there. It was like the Minnesota State Fair but at a temple. When we finally squeezed our way into the temple, we burned incense as part of the buddist ritual, just like everyone else. Can you imagine hundreds of people all crowded together, some trying to get their incense lit around one of four burning locations and some people with 50 incense sticks burning in their hands and hot ashes dropping all of the place? What's worse is that if your incense sticks catch on fire, you must not blow it out, won't make buddha happy. Amanda's 30 incense sticks in one hand was on fire and people wearing sweaters and other clothes made up of flammable materials were all crowded together, I was fearing for my life and those of the others. If someone caught fire and spread to other people, the stampede that would result from it would be deadly. We did the little praying thing as fast as we could and got out of there. In the end we each ended up with some burns on our hands from ashes, ashes in our hair, and pink fingers from the incense.