Qing Ming Weekend

Last weekend was Qing Ming Festival. This traditional holiday is a time for Chinese people to remember and make offerings to their deceased relatives and ancestors. The customs involved include cleaning the tombs and graves of relatives, and making offerings of incense, fruit, drink and paper money. 

Due to this festival we had a long weekend, so Juliet and I were invited by her family friends to spend time with them over the weekend.

On the Saturday, we went and had a look around Yuandadu Park. This park was filled with beautiful blossoms that had just came out in the recent weeks. Amongst the blossoms there was a group of elderly Chinese ladies performing humorous songs and a sort of traditional style poetry. 

The parents of one of our friends who took us around the park came along as well. They brought along this wheelchair attached to a bike for the grandmother to sit in. Everyone was so fascinated by this contraption, they started to ask our friend where he bought it and asked if they could have a go. Here in the photo below is a stranger having a go at wheeling the grandmother around. 

On the Monday we went to a lake on the west side of Beijing to have a barbecue. The scenery was quite beautiful (if you ignored the constant sound of loudspeakers crackling in the distance and the sight of a factory's smoke stacks in the other direction). 

The friends that invited us brought their thirteen year old son along and also invited his classmates and their parents to come. 

The men cooking lamb skewers for lunch.

There was lots of food and interesting dishes, such as pigs ears, seen below. I tried it but I didn't really like it. The black looking dish is pork ribs in a sweet soy sauce with spices, which was much more to my liking.

Some of the dishes at the barbecue included pigs ears.

Lotus root, a very common vegetable eaten in China.

After lunch, I joined in on a game the kids were playing which involved throwing a hacky sack at other players. The rules were a bit complicated, but I got the hang of it eventually. It's too complicated to write on here, but the basic rule is that if the sack hits you, you lose a life and if your lives are used up, you trade places with one of the throwers and become a thrower yourself. 

Other rules are used that allow players to gain one, seven or eighteen lives. Players can lose a number of lives depending on certain situations, and can even end up with a negative number of lives. It's all very much based on maths and quick thinking as well as just having fun running around and dodging a hacky sack.