The Lantern Festival

So it turns out that fireworks kind of go on endlessly around the time of the Chinese New Year, or Spring Festival. Today, we learned in our Chinese tutorial, is the 15th day after the first day of the new year and is a festival called the Lantern Festival. There have been more dragon dancing, more cool dress up clothes, hard to recognize, but festive snacks, and right now at 8:45 in cool and rainy weather, endless firecrackers and fire works. I think this is the official end of the Chinese New Year so I guess that dogs are sleeping a bit more peacefully in China tonight... I couldn't help myself.

Learning Chinese. Today was our 5th lesson and despite what the kids say, we are getting better--learning more vocabulary and syntax, of course, but also learning more about the Chinese culture. Yesterday, I read a book review of "Dreaming in Chinese" by Deborah Fallows She, a linguist and fellow struggler with Chinese, posits that one can not truly understand a culture without being fluent in their language. That idea has been kicking around my head a lot and made some sense to me today when I learned that Chinese use the word zhu zai "to live" to describe wherever you are staying or visiting. So when Cherry, our tutor, found out that we were going to a hotel for one night this weekend in Hong Kong, she said that she would teach us "visit" or "stay at" dai zai but it is better to say zhu zai even if just for one night.

Maybe it means nothing, but I was thinking about how we definitely delineate home, house and other in English and would never say we lived in a hotel unless we were Eloise at the Plaza...right? What do you all think?