Chunjie - AKA Spring Festival or Chinese New Year

The Gregorian calendar isn't the only one around, and, according to the Chinese lunar calendar, winter is over and spring is around the corner. Spring festival, also known as Chunjie or the Chinese New Year, is a festival with thousands of years of customs embedded in it, so it's not just one thing. From a US perspective, it has elements of Christmas (big holiday, gift giving, holiday lights and decorations), Thanksgiving (giving thanks, feasting with family), Fourth of July (firecrackers), Halloween (All Saints Day), Memorial Day (remembrance of other dead relatives), and more.  Simply put it's a homecoming extending for many days before and after the new year, which is February 10th in 2013. Here comes the Year of the Snake.

I did join the billion plus travelers moving hither and thither via public transport, but it didn't seem that much crazier than usual to me. The train stations I have visited are always packed: When it's time for a train to load, the crowd presses so tightly on all sides that I think I could lift my feet and just be moved along. That said, I live in western China and might find the Spring Festival travel season ("chunyun") even more intense in the east.

Off the train, though, I have witnessed elements of "chunyun." I see people carrying not only suitcases but also mud buckets, sometimes on either end of a bamboo pole. I assume the mud buckets are full of food--fruits, sweets, dried meats. I had to book my train tickets early because of "chunyun" and know of Peace Corps volunteers who were out of luck when trying to make a last minute plan. I found that ATMs frequently ran out of cash. I see everywhere the infamous plaid plastic zip bags--full of gifts, no doubt. And, of course, all over are shops overflowing with red envelopes and all sorts of red banners, red lanterns, and red paper hangings. The streets are lined everywhere, even in Beibei, with millions of lights--not just white lights. Beibei's main thoroughfares had little red globes bobbing like pumpkins every foot or two between festoons of purple and yellow lights, thousands and thousands of them. Spectacular.

But Beibei is not where I'm spending the festival itself. A student kindly invited me to her home near LeShan, where I'm joining her extended family. Her "brothers" a "sister" and I are tackling nearby Mt. Emei (Emei Shan), one of the four sacred mountains for Buddhists and a spectacular site for its biodiversity and views of things cultural (over thirty temples) and natural (the Tibetan plateau not far to the west, the Sichuan basin to the east) and thieving monkeys.

These little critters jump on unsuspecting tourists, quickly rip open any flimsy bags, and unzip  backpack pockets if you don't move quickly. One man had a big bag full of dried noodles and other picnic goods, hoping to avoid the high costs of food higher up, and a monkey tore into all of it, with his family members watching aghast.

The sites of Mt. Emei are so spectacular, though, they warrant their own blog entry. Next time!