Long Vacation of Spring Festival Comes

The Chinese New Year is coming.

There will be 7 day holiday in China, from Jan 29 to Feb 4. Offices will be closed and reopened on Feb 5.

Strange Calendar

Just now, when I want to check my calenar, I double click on the time display on the right of Windows taskbar, I saw this interface for the first time:

screen-lunar.calendar.png

I don’t know what happened. I didn’t install anything, but why it changes to this view?

P.S. Other entries related to holidays in China.

7 thoughts on “Long Vacation of Spring Festival Comes

  1. Just came across your site. It is very intersting keep up the good work. I am chinese-australian living in australia since I was eight years old so your site is very enlightening. Hopefully will be visiting china next year if I get time off work. Will definately be visiting this site regularly to read about life in china. Happy Chinese New Year!!!

  2. Yes, xinnian kuai le! I’ve been trekking through Asia in recent days, and the festival in Shanghai was a blast. One minor complaint I have about this otherwise wonderful Chinese New Year celebration: In Shanghai, people were trying to speak English to me even though I’m fluent in Mandarin– been working in China for almost a decade. Also, even in the Dog Year Celebrations, I still kept running into street vendors trying to sell me cheap knock-off DVD/VCD copies of American Hollywood movies.

    Come on! When I go to China, especially for something as wonderfully culturally Chinese as the Lunar New Year celebrations, I’m doing it to *get away from* US culture for a moment, to soak up a bit of authentic Chinese culture. When it becomes clear that I’m a Chinese-speaker myself, I want to communicate to people on the streets in Chinese, I want to hear Chinese music, I want to buy authentic Chinese products, I want to eat Chinese-style food, and I want to watch Chinese movies. (The quality of Chinese cinema is becoming a lot better, and I have no doubt that it will soon reach the level of professionalism and production values we see in Hollywood.) Of all things, I don’t want to be in a place that just appears like a transplanted bubble of American culture!

    What is it with this fad in China these days with all things American/English? I’m a proud American, and yes, we do have good examples to follow in terms of business efficiency, transparency of corporate transactions and political structures, but come on– we’re far from perfect, and I feel like in some ways China is getting all of our very bad habits even more than our good ones. Like cooking. China has had one of the world’s best cuisines for centuries, and one of the things I like best about China is the food. But now, many Chinese are imitating the American diet, eating like Americans and cooking like Americans, eating fast food while moving away from traditional Chinese cuisine. Why, oh why are you doing this, since Americans have what is quite possibly the worst and most unhealthy diet in the entire world (except for maybe Britain)? Please, don’t imitate us here. And why do you spend so much time and energy making cheap copies of second-rate American Hollywood movies, when you could be putting all that creative energy instead into making top-quality Chinese movies of your own to share with the world? Ugh, it’s frustrating sometimes to be a waiguoren who doesn’t want to be in a version of his own Waiguo when he’s in Zhongguo itself!

  3. Sorry, Brent. I’ll have a word with the Chinese, and tell them to move back into the 1970s so that you can feel more comfortable. After all, a rare opportunity to speak English to a real, live native speaker should be passed up as soon as you become aware that you can have a conversation in plain old Mandarin.

  4. Krovvy,

    You seem to be a snarky, pompous little jerk with a stick shoved way up your rear end here. Either that or you’re a garden-variety idiot who doesn’t know how to read. I think Brent’s point was that this is *Chinese New Year*, a distinctive time in which foreigners like him would really like to imbibe Chinese culture and have the experience be as culturally authentic as possible. He and other Americans probably are perfectly happy to let the natives practice their English with them on other days of the year, but I think they have a point in that Chinese New Year should be one of those instances when the Chinese culture in all its glorious facets really does permeate the air in the major cities, rather than being besmirched by the prevalent presence of the rather dirty ersatz-American culture of copycat Hollywood movies and second-rate knock-offs of American music CDs (which, IMHO, is rather ugly no matter what day of the year it is).

    Besides, you seemed to have missed the most important point of his post and one that’s well-taken, which is that the Chinese seem to be imitating too many of Americans’ bad habits (like our American diet, which is indeed atrociously unhealthy and not something to be imitated) while absorbing too few of the lessons that really are valuable. Also, that Chinese people spend far too much precious time and energy merely copying and imitating the works and ideas of Americans, rather than pouring more of their creative impulses into producing their own movies, music, art, science, inventions and technology in Chinese, where their efforts would be much more productive and fruitful. Not having been to China myself I can’t comment whether that’s true or not from personal experience, but I’ve heard this from enough of my China-traveling friends to suspect that there’s a grain of truth in it. Try actually reading people’s posts the next time around. Either that, or take a course in basic 6th-grade reading comprehension before you post again.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *