www射-国产免费一级-欧美福利-亚洲成人福利-成人一区在线观看-亚州成人

Celebrating the Rabbit's arrival in a rainforest

By  Erik Nilsson (China Daily)
2011-02-18 16:39
Large Medium Small

As I gazed at the ink-wash that was the night sky over Malaysian Borneo's rainforest, I lamented its silence and its monochrome. It was the first chuxi (lunar new year's eve) my wife and I had spent outside of China since we moved to Beijing in 2006.

I knew the skies of China's capital - thousands of kilometers away from the swath of heaven I was staring up at - were sparkling with fireworks. Its air was shuddering with the percussions of perhaps millions of pyrotechnic detonations. And jubilant crowds were swirling through the smoky cracks between Beijing's buildings, cheering on the Year of the Rabbit's arrival.

I was pondering how surprised I was at how much I missed the hullabaloo, especially the way the skies danced with sparks and crackled with countless explosions, and about how something seemed just wrong about spending this night beneath an unconscious sky, when - BOOM!

Celebrating the Rabbit's arrival in a rainforest

The fiery spider legs of a bottle rocket radiated from the source of the concussion above. It was as if the sky was responding to our disapproval of its leadenness.

Then, another blazing flower bloomed above the jungle canopy. And another. And another.

But, little did we know, these fireworks were heralding the onset of full-on Malaysian celebrations of the Chinese Spring Festival, which, to our surprise, would rival anything we'd seen in the festival's country of origin.

Arriving in Kota Kinabalu city from the remote rainforests, we found the town was decked out for the Year of the Rabbit's arrival.

Dozens of billboards and signs were printed with portraits of government leaders - the first we saw was of the minister of transport - conveying Chinese New Year wishes. The streets downtown basked in the glow of thousands of red lanterns slung over the roadways.

The most decorated place we saw, oddly enough, was the Little Italy restaurant. The walls of this Mediterranean eatery in Malaysia were loaded with such adornments as lights shaped like Chinese characters that spelled out auspicious new year's wishes and rabbit-shaped paper-cuts. Vermillion garlands and string lights with tiny traditional lantern-shaped bulbs were coiled around every post and pillar. And two massive papier-mch dragons slithered through the air in the center of the main dining hall.

Never in our years in China had we seen such abunda

Celebrating the Rabbit's arrival in a rainforest

nce and variety of Chinese Spring Festival dcor as we were seeing in this country, where about 25 percent of the population is ethnically Chinese.

My wife and I were discussing this when our conversation was interrupted by the clanging of cymbals that announced the start of a lion dance across the street - something we'd had to seek out, rather than have come to us, during the Spring Festivals we'd spent in various regions of China.

Also, we had never seen a Chinese city as shut down for the festival as the Malaysian settlements we traveled through. Block after block of buildings was shuttered. Our quest for a morning cuppa took us past nearly a dozen locked up cafs until we finally found one that was open - the only store still doing business in a massive multistory shopping complex. It was similar in the "tourist agency district", a compound of several dozen travel companies, in which a single outlet was still operating.

While this Spring Festival wasn't spent at the homes of our Chinese friends as in previous years, in almost every other way, it was the biggest celebration of the holiday we'd yet participated in.

The experience made me eager for the seemingly inevitable day when Spring Festival is celebrated around the world (and not just in the Chinatowns that speckle most corners of the globe), in a way similar to how Christmas has been creeping into non-Western and predominantly non-Christian cultures, such as China's.

Hopefully, when that day comes, nobody anywhere in the world will have to spend a chuxi beneath a silent, dark night sky.

China Daily

 

分享按鈕
主站蜘蛛池模板: 欧美一级高清免费播放 | 亚洲综合伦理一区 | 亚洲国产精品成 | 亚洲欧美日韩久久精品第一区 | 美女张开腿黄网站免费国产 | 久久羞羞 | 亚洲 欧美 成人 | 国产亚洲精品日韩已满十八 | 欧美午夜三级我不卡在线观看 | 亚洲美女黄视频 | 久久精品国产99国产精品 | 国产精品视频永久免费播放 | 亚洲 欧美 日韩在线 | 99成人国产精品视频 | 成人免费一级片 | 亚洲国产一区二区a毛片 | 抱着cao才爽免费观看 | 正在播放国产一区 | 亚洲精品成人a在线观看 | 日本免费一区二区三区毛片 | 第四色成人网 | 91国内视频在线观看 | 国产日产高清欧美一区二区三区 | wwwav在线| 三级黄色网址 | a级黄色毛片免费播放视频 a级精品九九九大片免费看 | 国产精品18久久久久久vr | 国产亚洲女在线精品 | 99精品在线观看视频 | 国内精品影院久久久久 | 美女黄页网站 | 中文字幕一区二区三区精品 | 欧美高清在线视频一区二区 | 在线看欧美成人中文字幕视频 | 97视频免费公开成人福利 | 99热热久久这里只有精品166 | 欧美日韩精品一区二区视频在线观看 | 亚洲精品一区二区久久 | 伊人色在线观看 | 久久久久久久国产精品视频 | 免费看特级淫片日本 |