The Qingming festival (清明节) is a celebration for the remembrance of deceased family members. We were given a holiday for this occasion so many of us decided to travel to some other towns in the area. Vinnie and I were invited by my former roommate to travel with him to Chongqing for the weekend. We booked some flights last minute for the trip and made the 2 ½ hour flight to the mountain city in the west. This was a really great opportunity for us because Chongqing is a far more traditional city compared with Shanghai.We were treated to a day at the hot springs on Friday because this is a natural occurrence in Chongqing. The water at the springs is considered very healthy to the Chinese and they often put additional medicines in the water. One of his family friends took us out for lunch at a very nice restaurant where we were treated to some amazing food. We were told the chef at the restaurant is the same chef that cooks for our US Presidents when they visit China.
For dinner we ate a traditional Sichuan “hotpot” at a restaurant. The hotpot found in Chongqing is famous across China and is known for its extreme spiciness. This was an interesting meal because the pot is boiling hot grease at the center of the table and you drop your food into the cooking pot while you eat. We had duck intestine, cow stomach, and some other interesting dishes in our hotpot that night.
On Saturday, we met Dan's family and joined them for lunch in his hometown just outside of Chongqing. They had plans to visit his family memorial in the rural area outside of Chongqing for the day. We had an entire caravan of vehicles that we took to the countryside. It was really interesting to see the living environment of the locals to this area. There were rice fields and farmers plowing the fields with oxen. They build their fields in a step up ladder system and then flood them with water for growing rice. They literally plow their fields in mud up to their waste while they follow a oxen and plow. When we arrived at the area we had to hike up through some small homes on the way to the top of the mountain that his family owns for the memorial. I asked about the significance of this area and why his family chose to place the cement memorial at this mountain. They use an interesting method to plot the land with a gps and then pick a spot at random. His family then purchased the top of the mountain for this site.
This day was definitely a once in a lifetime experience and I doubt that I ever get to experience it again. We hiked to the top and began to lay out the site for the ceremony. In Chinese culture, they lay out a bunch of paper money to burn. They believe that burning the money will send it to their ancestors so that they can spend it. They even burn currency from other countries in the case that their ancestors would like to travel. I found this entire ceremony to be very interesting and I asked a lot of questions out of curiosity. The ceremony is rather lengthy and the entire family participates. They burn the money and then leave food and alcohol at the memorial site. The next portion of the ceremony came as a surprise to me. They laid out enough fireworks for a small town fourth of July and ended the ceremony with quite a show. The surrounding valley was echoing with all the noise and I made sure to take some pictures with the families permission.
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