Julia's Blog

The Chinese New Year marks the beginning of the new year in the Lunar Calendar. Therefore it is also called Lunar New Year or Spring Festival. This year, the lunar new year landed on February 16th and the year of the dog 狗 started.

Already some days before the Spring Festival we could feel it’s approaching as Shenzhen slowly began to get less and less crowded. Shenzhen is a very young city with mostly young people. For the Spring Festival most of them travelled home to their families, only a few people remaining in Shenzhen.

This is in the metro during this time - I could easily find a seat in line 1 which is always crowded…

The official holiday started on Thursday, which is the Chinese New Year’s Eve. On this day we wanted to eat out in a restaurant. But most of the restaurants were closed. You might think this is normal, as it’s a holiday, but in a place like Shenzhen, this is really surprising! Lucky for us, the city was more open the next day and life seemed slowly going back to normal…

Partly through the Spring Festival I was alsl working. This was actually not that bad, because as there were only little guests and had time to chat to my colleagues, freshen up my Chinese and learn about different traditions of this festival and also collect some hongbaos 红包.

As I just mentioned, one of the traditions during the Spring Festival is the giving and recieving of Hongbao. Hongbaos are red envelopes with money in there and are usually given from parents to children, bosses to their employees or also exchanged in friend groups. Important in the Hongbao is the amount, because you should chose a lucky number (for instance 88).Now that China mostly uses online payment, you can also send Hongbaos to other people through Wechat and then you can use the money to pay.

This is one Hongbao I recieved with the amount of 20.18 Yuan. The message 恭喜发财，大吉大利 congratulates you to the new year and wishes you to make I fortune in the next year.

But even better is that you can send a Hongbaos to a Wechat group. You can enter an amount of money and then it gets distributed randomly to all people that open it (usually the people that open first recieve more money). And because if you open a Hongbao you should also send one, this evolves to a Hongbao Party in the Wechat group.

During the Spring Festival Holiday my dad and me also explored a little western Guangdong, about which I will tell you more in my next Blog.