What will you do and eat for Lunisolar New Year? Hot Pot, Beach or Sing?

[lostinasia]

@Explant

Its one of those times where the busiest hubs like taipei drain

I dunno … I’ve heard that used to be the case, but I certainly don’t feel much of that in Taipei these days.

@yinggeaussie

There is an old thread somewhere that someone started that sets out their CNY experiences, added to by another that updated things rather jokingly. It used to get resurrected about this time each year and I have been searching for it but no luck so far…

Here ya go, from @Duke in 2010, over here:

@Duke

Chinese New Year in Taiwan is a special time when families get together and have conversations watch TV. People enjoy giving carefully selected gifts that they know the recipient will love cash in red envelopes. And watching TV.

Food plays an important part, also. The tables are set with grandma’s best lace tablecloth plastic sheeting, and the good silverware, china and crystal plastic cups, pink paper plates and disposable chopsticks are laid out on a candlelit table lit by the unsteady glare of a flickering fluorescent tube.

The roast turkey is taken out of the oven dishes of food are covered in saran wrap, nuked in the microwave, and left to cool on the table hours before dinner. Because this is CNY, while eating, people are on their best behaviour watching TV, grunting and reaching across the table to get desired morsels of food. Children under the age of 12 remember to say please and thank you are hand-fed by their over-indulgent mothers, and people take extra care to remember their table manners spit out chicken bones and shrimp shells into crystal bowls little paper boxes made of folded up junk mailers.

After dinner, the family sits in the living room and talks watches TV some more. At night, people like to go outside and go caroling, sharing the joy and beauty of the season light fireworks on the city streets, the noiser the better.

After that people go back home and watch more TV.