The Chinese New Year is a riotous celebration of dazzling, colorful, bigger-than-life, simulated animals, thunderous firework displays, and thrilling anticipation of new beginnings, good fortune and health. Unlike western New Year celebrations that mark one night only, Chinese New Year
celebrations focus on a range of days to celebrate and mark the coming of spring as the season of new beginnings.
The Chinese New Year is an astronomically determined, movable date that always occurs at the second new moon after the Winter Solstice. The New Year triggers celebrations that last fifteen days from the new moon to the first full moon. The beautiful Lantern or Shang Yuan Festival is the last celebration in this time period and is often called the Second New Year for its exuberant good spirit, delicious sweet treats, animated simulated animals, clever riddles, and its special trademark touch, beautiful lanterns.
Originated in the Tang dynasty, the fifteenth day of the first lunar month is the birthday of Shang Yuan, the God of Heaven. Children carry beautifully decorated lanterns on the night of the festival and hundreds more lanterns adorn temples. Displays of original and unique lanterns are exhibited for everyone to enjoy and activities such as stilt-walking and dancing traditional folk dances such as the yangge are sure to be represented.
Lantern Festival emphasizes the culture and tradition of the family through the use of lanterns decorated with scenes and motifs that incorporate popular family traditional and mythic stories. The stories, similar to European fairy tale collections, teach root values of family through the designs chosen to decorate the lanterns. Scenes from popular, seminal folklore such as the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the Legend of the White Snake, the Weaving Maiden and the Cowherd, reinforce the teaching of these tales.
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
Monday, August 3, 2009
Your Sea Kayaking Vacation: A Few Safety Tips
One of the surprises of a winter getaway sea kayaking vacation to tropical or otherwise distant waters is now that you're far from home, your database of timetables and paddling distances doesn't apply to where you're vacation. Come the hour or two before dusk, you're in somewhat of a pickle. Perhaps you don't know how brief dusk is on those new waters, not unusual for paddlers traveling for the first time in latitudes further south.
In more southern waters such as Florida, sunsets happen fast: a faint wink on the horizon and now the sea is DARK. Other areas, such as in Alaska, Seattle, and Cape Cod, the tides may run harder than you expected, or in directions counter to your return.
Any of the above can keep a vacationing paddler out after dark. Even the uniqueness your vacation place can hold us out after dark: intrigued by the locale, you walk the shoreline a little further, snorkel the reef a little longer, poke around in shoreside town an hour more.
Regardless of why you get caught out after dark while sea kayaking, here are some basic guidelines on what to anticipate if you're caught out on the water after dark.
In remote areas, the problems boil down to fear, anxiety, and disorientation, even if the possibility of getting run down by a powerboat is unlikely.
The fear of not being able to see arrives first: of not being able to anticipate the effect of passing swell or breaking waves; of not being able to see land; of not being able to track paddling companions; of not being able to gauge speed, distance, or forward progress.
Normal input about where you are on the water - your proprioception of whether you are drifting or rocking, tipping or leaning, moving forward, sideways, or back - no longer comes by way of vision.
At night in isolated waters, physical reactions tend to take over. Straining for visual references on which to focus, you discover your eyes do not help. You experience greater fear.
Flipping the headlamp on to glance at the chart, whether for reassurance or simply to cease peering ahead into darkness, you discover that what little night vision you had, you've lost. The darkness grows deeper.
Not to get too dramatic, but the above is, typically, when loss of balance, dizziness, even vertigo kick in. Straining for a reference point to fix your eyes upon, you feel suspended in air, without foundation.
This is quite dangerous. You will have lost the ability to think straight, to assess your location and your situation.
So before you take that sea kayaking vacation, paddle at night a few times in your homewaters first, to checking whether you are prone to nighttime vertigo in a kayak, the loss of balance, the fear that begins in the pit of the stomach and soon spreads to your awareness and better judgment.
In more southern waters such as Florida, sunsets happen fast: a faint wink on the horizon and now the sea is DARK. Other areas, such as in Alaska, Seattle, and Cape Cod, the tides may run harder than you expected, or in directions counter to your return.
Any of the above can keep a vacationing paddler out after dark. Even the uniqueness your vacation place can hold us out after dark: intrigued by the locale, you walk the shoreline a little further, snorkel the reef a little longer, poke around in shoreside town an hour more.
Regardless of why you get caught out after dark while sea kayaking, here are some basic guidelines on what to anticipate if you're caught out on the water after dark.
In remote areas, the problems boil down to fear, anxiety, and disorientation, even if the possibility of getting run down by a powerboat is unlikely.
The fear of not being able to see arrives first: of not being able to anticipate the effect of passing swell or breaking waves; of not being able to see land; of not being able to track paddling companions; of not being able to gauge speed, distance, or forward progress.
Normal input about where you are on the water - your proprioception of whether you are drifting or rocking, tipping or leaning, moving forward, sideways, or back - no longer comes by way of vision.
At night in isolated waters, physical reactions tend to take over. Straining for visual references on which to focus, you discover your eyes do not help. You experience greater fear.
Flipping the headlamp on to glance at the chart, whether for reassurance or simply to cease peering ahead into darkness, you discover that what little night vision you had, you've lost. The darkness grows deeper.
Not to get too dramatic, but the above is, typically, when loss of balance, dizziness, even vertigo kick in. Straining for a reference point to fix your eyes upon, you feel suspended in air, without foundation.
This is quite dangerous. You will have lost the ability to think straight, to assess your location and your situation.
So before you take that sea kayaking vacation, paddle at night a few times in your homewaters first, to checking whether you are prone to nighttime vertigo in a kayak, the loss of balance, the fear that begins in the pit of the stomach and soon spreads to your awareness and better judgment.
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