Rats, KTV and 6 Year Old Pyrotechnicians

It is Chinese New Year time. 2008 is the Year of the Rat. I guess it is a good year for wealth and marriage. But I think the translation is messed up because almost everything is good for wealth and marriage.

It is one of the most important times of the year for Asia. It’s like Christmas for western people. I got invited to New Year’s Eve dinner with a local family. So that’s like inviting a Chinese guy into your home for Christmas Eve and all the dude can really say in English is “Merry Christmas, I am very happy to meet you”. How cool and hilarious would that be? Well, that was me.

It is very important to light off lots of fireworks at the New Year to ward off bad spirits. I think last year I wrote that it was to ward off dragons. I found out later that dragons are actually really lucky. So it was a translation error that I am now retracting. I dare you to guess how many “facts” I have written over the past year are completely off base…..

Anyway, people have been blowing off professional grade fireworks for the last two weeks. At the local family’s house, they put a kid who looked like he was 10 in charge of the pyrotechnics. His assistant was probably about 6 and they were using the back porch as a platform. The best is when a firework accidentally shoots sidways and the kids run and hide and then start laughing and wrestling around in the dirt before lighting another bomb. Since the children had firework duty, the adults were free to chug wine and eat way too much food indoors.

I actually attended two dinners since the guys were brothers who lived next door to each other. One guy was pretty excited to drink wine with foreigners. Lots of neighbors and relatives kept stopping by and they wanted to chug with foreigners as well. So the brothers had to go find more wine in some dusty, cockroach ridden boxes. The wine was pretty crappy but the food was a nice combination of seafood, pork and pork stomach….

After dinner, everyone retired to the “living room” of one of the houses for karaoke and mahjong. Actually, the living room had roll up garage doors and in addition to the couches and entertainment center, they also had 5 scooters, an office and lots of pump repair supplies (the brother is in the pump business).

I was learning mahjong and singing karaoke at the same time. It was very difficult to understand the mahjong instructions since we had to crank karaoke to 10 in order to hear the singing over the bombs going off outside. With the high ceilings and concrete floors, it made for a fairly insane after dinner entertainment. I do understand money and it turns out that mahjohng is a gambling game and you should yell whenever someone wins or loses. Oh yeah, since there aren’t heaters in Taiwan and it had been in the low 50’s lately, I didn’t take my jacket off the whole time. So I was yelling, singing, freezing and paying out money to people who thought I was a pretty funny side show.

So there you have a little taste of a Taiwan version of Christmas dinner. Let me tell you that after all of the crappy wine, KTV cranked to 10, ridiculously confusing mahjong instructions (in Chinese and broken English) and bombs going off on all sides, I had a pretty bad headache by the time I made it home….

I guess Taiwan is similar to China in that if it is not loud, confusing and slightly insane, it’s not worth doing.

Happy New Year!