Dragon Boat Festival

Happy Dragon Boat Festival!  This weekend China celebrated the Dragon Boat Festival, which meant that both Jamie and LBean had Friday off.  We celebrated by watching some dragon boat races and sampling "zongzi".  The festival celebrates an ancient story.  Our girls have a book called Celebrating the Dragon Boat Festival and it explains the story like this:

"More than two thousand years ago in the Kingdom of Chu lived a patriotic poet named Qu Yan.  He discovered that the neighboring Kingdom of Qin wanted to conquer the Kingdom of Chu.  He immediately told the Kind of Chu, who refused to believe him and banished him instead.  Several years later, the capital of Chu was attache and taken by the Qin.  When Qu Yuan received the news, he fell in despair and tossed himself into the Miluo River.  When the people found out, they were terribly sad.  They rowed their boats up and down to rescue Qu Yuan, but could not find him.  Then the people began to toss rice balls as sacrifices to Qu Yuan.  To make sure that the fish could not steal the rice, they wrapped the rice in reed leaves."

We went to the lake that our apartment building looks out onto to watch some of our friends compete in a dragon boat race.  The team had been practicing two times a week (I think) for several weeks.  They were rowing to win prize money for charity.  The weather was not great; a bit cool and very rainy, but at least it wasn't hot.

We met up with one of LBean's classmates and her family
to watch the races.

Not only could you see the races, but it was possible
to see bare buns through the very common-place "split
bottom pants".  It puts a twist on potty training!

This little girl's mommy was racing!

A little rain didn't dampen our spirits.

"Ji you!"  It's the phrase you yell to cheer on your team.

Those are some strong mommies and friends.  Good job!

My friends' team won second place and 10,000 RMB
for their charity.

The night before the race a friend of ours in our apartment complex shared some of the "zongzi" that her Ayi had been making.  I was very excited to see real sticky rice because I was very certain that I couldn't make it correctly!

Unwrapping the "zongzi".

Each of the "zongzi" has a filling.  These fillings could be meat, sweet red bean paste, jujube paste or other regional favorites, and ours happened to be shredded pork.