But my strongest memory of this year’s Spring Festival will most likely be the food. So much food. It seems like we’ve been eating constantly – and when I’ve been full, I’ve been urged to taste just one more thing. In China, people often show consideration for others around the table by picking the tastiest pieces out of the dishes on the table and loading them onto your plate, while urging you to eat more – which can be difficult to get used to for us foreigners, who might not like the same dishes that Chinese people consider to be the tastiest (which are usually the most rare and therefore also the most strange), and who also generally like to stop eating when we’re full. This was especially true in Kunming, where our friend’s aunt showed her hospitality by filling our plates with food, and when we had finished that, loading our plates with more and urging us to taste everything from the selection of dishes that covered the table, always enough for at least three times the size of our group. The food she cooked at home was delicious, and when we ate out it was always at very nice restaurants, but there was always so much, it was hard for my stomach to keep up. Yesterday was only the second time I’ve had rice since I left home almost two weeks ago – rice is filler food, and at every meal there’s been so much cooked food that there’s been no need (or room) for rice.

羊肉汤

In Weiyuan, my friend protected me from being forced to over-eat – she wanted me to taste all of her favorite food from her home town, so she insisted that I didn’t have to finish anything I ate. There, instead, the focus was on variety. I have now tasted cow stomach, duck throat, duck intestine, and duck tongue. Yesterday morning we left home at 6 am to have time for sheep soup before our bus to Chengdu, a soup boiled from sheep everything (stomach, intestines, skull) from which I managed to choose mostly only meat pieces from the soup and hide the sheep blood pudding under my rice. We had the soup with plum wine, “to warm us up”. I soon learned not to ask until after I had finished eating what it was I had just eaten, and sometime it wasn’t as bad as I thought (thick rice noodles), sometimes it was (pig’s ears). To be fair, most organs were perfectly edible, but it’s hard to get used to the consistency of stomach and tongue, let alone the thought of what it was I was eating. I’ve definitely broadened my food horizons on this trip.

People also have a tendency to notice which dishes you eat from the most, or which dishes you praise the most, and then see to it that those dishes magically appear again at the next meal, which really is very considerate. Our last evening in Weiyuan, we had hot pot, and the person sitting to my right, one of my friend’s high school classmates, must have noticed that I preferred to eat the meat pieces from the pot, while everyone else around the table clearly liked stomach, intestines, throat and tongue the best. When he fished around for the cooked food at the bottom of the pot, he picked out a piece of duck’s throat for the person to his right, something suspicious-looking for himself, and a piece of meat for me, to my great relief. Sometimes people say that Chinese people show emotions more through actions than words, and food definitely seems to be one way to show care and consideration.

In Weiyuan, my friend also made sure that I tasted as many of their local snacks as possible, which she insisted I wouldn’t be able to find anywhere else in China (at least not with the same flavor) – most of our schedule for the three days I was there was planned around fitting in as much food as possible. I gave up early on trying to remember the names of everything I was eating. Since this is Sichuan, a lot of it was spicy (tofu with rice and a spicy sauce; spicy cold rice noodles; spicy cold egg noodles; something that looked like ravioli in a spicy soup), but there were also things that were sweet (my favorite was a snack that looked like a small pancake, with lots of different options for fillings, including chocolate; another good one was a brown cold soup with a type of noodle that looked a little bit like shrimp; raw sugar cane was peeled, chopped up and sold as a snack on the street; and all of the tea houses had a type of chrysanthemum tea with red dates, goji berries, and pieces of raw sugar cane). And then here in Chengdu, we’ve done the same thing with Chengdu food. We had lunch (which consisted of what must have been at least ten different kinds of local snacks) today at a food-court style restaurant that she said a friend of hers from Taipei flies to Chengdu specifically to eat at, and he then flies back when he’s finished his meal.

My friend's mother, shopping for Chinese medicine

And to top it all off, my friend’s mother sent me off with a huge bag filled with home-cooked meats and sausages, typical Weiyuan snacks, apples for the road, and a bag of Chinese medicine that I’m to boil and drink at the start of next year’s winter to build up my immune system. I thought that my bags coming home (with presents unloaded – the bottle of Absolut I brought seemed very popular with her parents) would be lighter than when I set off a week and a half ago, but now instead I’m coming back with overfilled luggage and more food than I can possible finish. Anyone hungry?

The positive impression is also colored by the fact that thanks to our friend, we’ve been getting VIP treatment since the moment we stepped off the plane. On our first afternoon, we were taken to the “Yunnan Nationalities Village”, a theme park for displaying the cultures of the different minority groups that live in Yunnan (as well as elephants). Our friend’s father knows the manager of the park, and after being dropped off just inside one of the side entrances to the park, the manager personally welcomed us, and then handed us over to a guide who first brought us to the park restaurant for a very fancy lunch and then showed us around the park. We were driven around in a park-style golf cart, and the guide made sure that we made it to each part of the park just in time for each of the different dance performances. In the evening, the park held its yearly Spring Festival dinner for its employees and a few specially-invited local officials, and we were invited to join the dinner and observe the festivities. So all in all, a very VIP tour of the park.

A replica of Xishuangbanna's Manfeilong pagoda

I have to admit, I was fairly sceptical of the idea of a “minorities theme park”, it sounds suspiciously like a “minorities zoo”. The park itself was actually built in a fairly tasteful way, with beautiful replicas of important sites in Yunnan and examples of the types of houses that different minority groups in Yunnan have traditionally lived in (in that way, it was a little bit similar to Skansen in Stockholm, which does the same thing for traditional Swedish culture). In each “village” inside the park, there were also performances of traditional cultural dances, performed by park employees from those minority groups, which was also interesting to see and done in both a tasteful and entertaining way.

A performer climbs a ladder made of swords

But then there were also a few people who seemed to be hired just to be there, as a part of the scenery, in more of a zoo-type way. In one of the “villages”, an old woman with a tattooed face (typical for one of the minority groups in Yunnan)  walked around among the houses. Our guide thought we should have our picture taken with her, but the woman objected, and told the guide that she didn’t like foreigners because once during the Water Splashing Festival, some foreigners called her names and attacked her with water guns. We insisted that we didn’t need a picture, but the guide convinced the woman that we were friendly foreigners, and in the end we all took a group photo together. I assume that all of the people who work at the park have chosen to do so because the pay and/or conditions are better than their other options, but walking around a park to “look at” minorities still feels very awkward.

The front of the church, with the altar labelled "altar" in Chinese, and Christmas trees on either side

There’s also apparently a minority group in Yunnan that practices Christianity, and to display that group’s culture, the park had built a small replica of a church, complete with wall murals, an altar, and choir music playing in the background, and everything inside labelled and explained. As someone who has grown up in countries where Christianity is mainly seen as a religion rather than as a cultural curiosity, it was a bit surreal to see a church in the park alongside everything else. But it put the whole park into good perspective, and in a way made me feel like at least the cultural voyeurism was taking place on slightly more even terms.

The text reads: The religion, which worships Jesus Christ the Savior, believes in that God created and rules over everything on earth, and takes the Old Testament and the New Testament as its Holy Bible, has given birth to three major sects of the Roman Catholicism, the Orthodox Eastern Church and the Protestantism, and churches are the public venues where its disciples worship the God. Catholicism and Christianity propagated to Yunnan's minority-inhabited areas over a century ago, and have sizeable numbers among the Miao, Yi, Nu, Lisu and Lahu minority people. To objectively portray this religious folk culture, a Christian church is built in the Miao Village.

On Spring Festival Eve, we walked around on Kunming’s West Mountain, fed seagulls by the side of the lake (apparently the thing to do here, they sell some sort of seagull food on the sidewalk), had a big family dinner at a golf club in Kunming, and then went home to watch the Spring Festival show on TV (there was singing, dancing, magic and comedy – other than the magic, a skit with a hysterically laughing woman with a recent face-lift was by far the most popular among the non-Chinese speakers in our audience, trans-cultural humor). Humor can usually be tough to learn in a new language, so I was especially proud when I got some of the jokes in the very first skit, references to popular online phrases this year. The time I’ve spent “studying” online has been rewarded.

Fish drying in the sun

It started a couple of weeks ago, with fish. On a sunny day, there they were, hanging in a tidy row on a stick by the side of the street. A few days later, someone had hung up some pieces of meat to dry. Now it’s everywhere — fish, chickens, beef, pork, sausages, all marinated and hung up in rows on railings, balconies, and by the sidewalk, drying in the sun. Even my neighbors have gotten in on the act.

I asked my students this afternoon what was up with all of the meat hung out to dry, and they confirmed what I suspected — Spring Festival preparations are underway. Apparently people traditionally marinate different kinds of meat for Spring Festival, and then hang it to dry wherever they can find space. In the case of my neighbors, that means pushing their laundry to the side to make room for meat on their balconies.

Meat hanging to dry on my neighbor's balcony