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Hello everyone,
Today the Chinese New Year (CNY) holiday ends and I would like to tell you about what has been going on. First of all, the CNY is the most important holiday of the year to spend with your family. Therefore, everybody was travelling home and I decided that traveling was not such a great idea, since the tickets are expensive and it gets crowded. So I stayed at a very quiet campus and enjoyed the relaxed atmosphere.
Before the CNY there are several flower markets all over the city. However, it would be too straight forward if they were mostly selling flowers. No, they mostly sell stuffed animals, at least at the market in Causeway Bay where I was. I later heard that this is some kind of school promotion trying to get students into doing ?business?. Well, business is most important here in HK, so I can well imagine that. If you were to buy flowers, though, every color stands for something different that you wish for. If people get yellow flowers, they wish for more fortune, totally like HK. What I really liked were the ?pet balloons?(see pictures). For example, you have the balloon of
a dog and the gas in it only allows it to fly just above the ground. So you can ?walk? your balloon just like you would walk a real dog;-)A lot of customs go with the CNY: A few days before you are supposed to clean your house. The day before you should not take a shower, because you will wash away all good luck. The older generation gives the younger generation red pockets. As the name suggests, those are literally red pockets with varying designs containing some pocket money.
I was too exhausted to make it to the official parade, but I went to see the fireworks in Victoria Harbour. In contrast to New Year in January it was nicely warm and sunny and the fireworks already started at 8pm. The Avenue of the Stars is a great area to wait, because there you have got benches and the police closes it before it gets really filled up to prevent that there might be too many people. So after all it is never crowded there and you can just enjoy the fireworks. The only thing they really need to change are the speakers. You can hear
that there is supposed to be music with the fireworks and I remember from the ones I saw for the midautumn festival that the music went perfect with the fireworks. So it is a pity not to be able to hear it. At some point you could make out that it was supposed to be the Gangam Style;-) I wander if that really fitted, but I didn?t hear it well enough to be able to tell. In any case, as I had guessed during the fireworks for ?our? New Year, the city was saving the real deal for the CNY. This time they illuminated the whole sky for about 20min. I still particularly like the different shapes, like flowers or something looking like Mickey Mouse to me (not sure if that?s what it?s supposed to be;-)).On the next day I have been invited by one of my neighbors here in the student hostel to join her and her family for CNY. That was very kind and I enjoyed staying with her family and experiencing the ?real? CNY with the decoration and all the food.
As a grand finale of this week I went to a performance of
the West End and Broadway show ?One Man Two Guvnors? by a visiting team of actors from the UK. As I have found out by now, Japan, Korea and probably several other countries have a wide selection of concerts, theatre performances, musicals etc. In comparison, Hong Kong is a cultural desert. The theatres and venues are there, but when you look at their schedules, there are hardly any professional performances, no matter whether in English or Cantonese. The lights in the darkness are a small venue called ?Fringe Club?, which promotes overseas touring and holds small productions in an even smaller location, capacitating in my guess 30-50 people in the audience. The other lights are also touring productions from overseas that then play in bigger venues. One of them was now the above mentioned show ?One Man Two Guvnors?.The basic content of the play is as the title suggests a guy who is serving two governors at the same time, resulting in all kinds of confusions. However, the cast was great and especially the main actor highly enthusiastic. Moreover, many situations were unpredictable and so I heard many people discussing during the break whether something was scripted or
not. For example, the main actor asks the audience for a sandwich and indeed someone is offering him one. The main actor was laughing real hard explaining that his questions on stage are not ?real questions?. One major point that made this show so vital was that there was a lot of interaction with the audience. My favorite part of the show was the live band who highly reminded me of the Baseballs and who filled the breaks between the scenes.After the show one could stay to have a Q&A session with some of the actors. It was very interesting to learn that since it would have been so expensive to ship the set from the UK to HK, they built a completely new one just for those few performances. Furthermore, the actors also mentioned that the audience here reacts quite differently than the audience in the UK. One reason is for example that due to the Chinese subtitles people (those speaking Chinese) got the punch line and laughed before it was actually said.
So now we are officially having the year of the snake. The snake is always portrayed in a few cute way, so nothing
to be afraid of;-)Have a great year of the snake:-)
Lara
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Source: http://www.travelblog.org/Asia/Hong-Kong/blog-771766.html
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