Happy New Year of the Rabbit!

Last night I returned to my Nanning home from a 10-day visit to Yanyan's village, like last year. The year of the Rabbit is now officially opened! In the countryside the Spring Festival is taken very seriously. The protocol includes visits to as many relatives as possible, exchanging well wishes, handing out red envelopes with money (crisp new bills obtained from the bank), and of course a lot of eating and drinking.
This year was not much different from last year's visit. Tradition requires a yearly repetition of the essential rituals that make up a good Spring Festival, including cleaning the house and decorating the doorways with red banners with calligraphed texts, either home-made, or bought at one the many New Year's markets.

Most time is spent on cooking. Each family has their own way of making the traditional dishes, such as Zongzi （粽子）, Kourou （扣肉 - alternate slices of cooked pork belly and fried taro), and many variations on duck, chicken, and fish.
When visiting friends or relatives during the Spring Festival, it is customary to bring gifts. In these regions, the most ubiquitous gift is a live chicken, bound by the feet, and carried casually upside-down, often hanging from one of the handles while riding a motorbike, or just tossed in the trunk of the car. People here bring a live chicken like we bring a bottle of wine. The handling of animals remains a touchy subject in China. Not so much for the Chinese themselves, but for me to watch. I still feel rather uncomfortable when I see how many live chickens, ducks, or piglets can be squeezed into a bamboo crate for a long ride on the back of a motorbike or stacked with many others in a truck.
During the the week at Yanyan's home, several chickens got their throat sliced, their blood dripping into a bowl for later boiling as a nutritious ingredient for the soup, the splatters leaving dark stains on the cement porch. It's a lot of work to remove all the feathers and prepare the chicken for cooking, but spending time on preparing a meal is always a time well spent. Yanyan's father especially is a great cook, and it's delightful to watch him skillfully prepare so many dishes in the dark and smokey kitchen, wood fires kept burning under the cast iron woks build into a large brick furnace. We were asked to bring a new chopping board from Nanning, so we bought a large circular board of 50 cm diameter (basically a slice of a hardwood tree), weighing a hefty 12.5 kg.

We visited Yanyan's grandmother who lives in another village not too far away, and went to Lipu (a small city which serves as marketplace and travel hub of the region) a couple of times, and also to a large party in yet another village, to celebrate the arrival of a new family member. In North-America such a party would probably be called a baby shower, but here the focus was on eating, instead of gifts. A crew of about 20 people were preparing food for at least 150 guests, outside, in the courtyard of the tofu-making farm run by the family. Towers of large steamers holding many pork, fish and other dishes, above roaring wood fires. A cook stir-frying meat and veggies in a giant wok. Once everybody was seated around rented tables, the food was served and after it all went down, the party was more or less over.

New Year's Day (Feb 3rd) was used by some female villagers for scooter or motorbike driving lessons by the owners of the vehicles or other volunteers, such as me. I had not driven any motorized two-wheeled vehicle since 1995 in Lombok, Indonesia, where I had rented a motorbike for a day from a local, but the scooter of Yanyan's younger brother was easy to handle. It's a 110 cc engine with four foot-operated gears and automatic clutch. Still, with a nervous Yanyan as my first-timer student, and the unpaved road leading into the village as testing ground, it was not a risk-free exercise. But she learned quickly, and could drive down the 2 km in second gear with me as a passenger after a couple of hours practice.
The most magical was the dramatic change in weather just a day into the year of the rabbit. The temperature jumped more than 10 degrees and the cold grey winter skies of the past 2 months were suddenly gone. Last year exactly the same thing happened. Today in Nanning it was 25 degrees, 15 degrees higher than on the day we left. Spring Festival, a name well chosen!