Yesterday was the eve of The Spring Festival - known in the West as Chinese New Year. It is the night of the reunion dinner when family from far and wide return home to be with
- Shanghai First Food Hall
their parents. We have been watching the build up of this movement of people with many people leaving Shanghai over the last week to be with their parents yesterday. Many travel very light with just carry on luggage - one or two seem to take their whole possessions with them - but the most important thing to take home is food. Often more food is taken than all other luggage. We were in the Shanghai First Food Hall yesterday afternoon watching frenzy of food buying,
- Crowd around cooked deli section
similar to the UK on Christmas Eve in any major supermarket, but the cacophony was extraordinary. Rozy had said before that the Chinese didn't seem to have any volume control and yesterday in the Shanghai First Food Hall it felt just like that, particularly around the cooked deli section which was particularly frenetic.
- Red gift food boxes
Many take home gifts of dried fruits and nuts, if they are travelling far, packaged in scarlet decorated boxes. Others closer to home take baskets of fresh fruit, but also any kind of food imaginable.
- Flattened dried pigs head
As is usual there were lots of dried meats for sale in the food hall, some were particularly gruesome - no one thought it would be a good idea to remove the eyeballs from these flattened pig's heads (something they do in our local Carrefour - must be due to French sensibilities).
And we weren't quite sure what cured poultry we were seeing - there was certainly chicken, duck and goose in the pile, but there may have been others. The local gastronomes would know. The
- Cured poultry
French think that they love their food more than anyone else, but I don't think they have got a patch on the Chinese. Food and family gatherings are SO important to them.
Richard has several days off work, but did what the locals do, which is go into work last Sunday and he will again next Saturday, so that not that many days off work are taken, but everybody has three days off in a row.
- Main Hall Waldorf Astoria
We don't have our family with us, they are all back in Europe, but we decided to have our own celebratory meal by treating ourselves to tea at the Waldorf Astoria on The Bund. We selected a type of oolong tea each - mine was from Taiwan: Tie Guan Yin Tea (Iron Goddess) and was delicious. We also had "High Tea" - the waitress demonstrated this by showing us the height of the cake stand with her hands as we ordered - a novel definition of High Tea - especially as what we were having was Low Tea, on a low table - but there you go, the English language and its customs get so warped around the world. Low tea becomes High Tea in up market hotels. High Tea is often just shortened to Tea in northern England and is a working class meal made up dishes such as steak and kidney pudding and apple pie. This is a meal that would be served later in the
- Low Tea at the Waldorf Astoria
evening and called Dinner in the south of the UK. (Dinner in the north is lunch(eon) elsewhere). Confused? So is the rest of the world but the British (mostly) know what you mean - as long as we can hear it said in the correct accent........ Richard's Chinese colleagues have asked him to explain the difference between Tea, Afternoon Tea and High Tea. As you can imagine it is a cultural and social minefield, that even the Brits can get wrong.
Anyway our cake stand was full of delightful bite-sized mouthfuls of sandwiches, meat puffs, a rather strange sausage roll, a mini quiche, salmon pate on bread, slices of ham and cheese on bread and duck pate on a mini roll on the bottom tier.
On the second layer we had scones and cream served with a cherry compote and a unsweet raspberry jam.
On the top layer were mini red velvet cakes, pink macaroons, mini fruit tarts, a lemon mousse, chocolate layer cake with gold leaf decoration, a cream puff, a sort of strawberry mouse and a custard tart. Everything came doubled up except the fruit yoghurt in a mini glass which Richard finished off as I was full to bursting.
- Fireworks carcass
- Clearing up the mess
We rolled out of the hotel and on our way home the fireworks that welcome in the New Year had already started. They were setting them off in the street down the road from the hotel. As you can see they make an awful amount of mess, but as soon as they had finished letting them off there were several ladies out with brooms clearing up the debris.
When we got back to the apartment the fireworks started in earnest. Rozy had described the fireworks in Beijing two years ago as like being in the Battle of the Somme and I think that phrase was very apt for what we went through last night. The firework bombardment started around 6pm last night and went on non stop whilst we were going to sleep at around 0.45 am and there were more and cracks this morning as we woke. Apart from a couple of episodes of firecrackers that go off at street level what we experienced last night were rockets. Powerful rockets that all reached the top of the 20 story blocks of flats, all around us and far, far into the distance. At times it was like a rolling roar of thunder. At other times it was like a high speed train going through the apartment as the sound from a nearby display ricocheted off the tower blocks behind. The photos I took were of a display from behind the next tower block. It was all over in about 5 minutes, but I should think that at least 50 rockets went off in just that one salvo. I tried to take some photos but it is difficult to get across just what we experienced last night. Each display seemed to be in a "mine's bigger and louder and better than yours" competition. I just can't believe how much money must have been spent on gunpowder across the city and wonder at how they managed to get all these fireworks distributed around the place without any accidents. No wonder the Chinese ask for a prosperous New Year. Someone's got to pay for all those bangs and whistles to keep the evil spirits away from the year of the sheep.
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