A couple of days ago, I asked my Mandarin teacher, if she could give us some details about the upcoming Dragon Boat Festival celebrations. We have a school holiday next weekend and I was wondering where we should go to celebrate. None of our contacts seemed know about any festivities - not our Mandarin teacher, nor the folks at the admissions office, nor our friend Fenny. They all agreed that the Dragon Boat Festival was celebrated by eating zongzi - a type of sticky rice. I had read that there were dragon boat races in Jimei, a city rumored to be nearby and, the admissions office was able to verify this on the internet. Thankfully, our former classmate, Maria, let us know that we could take city bus 18 to get there.
We arrived in time for the opening ceremonies. Jimei had a huge dragon boat pool, which looked like it was specifically constructed to host races. Teams were doing short bursts of warm-ups and group-shouting to get themselves psyched.
The judge's "booth"
Dragon boats awaiting the races
Teams arriving
Pre-competition shut-eye
Embarking
As soon as we chose our final viewing spot, but before we actually sat down, Calliope made an English-speaking friend. He had come to root for his school's team. There were about seventy teams competing from mainland China, the United States, Guam, Malaysia, Hongkong, and Taiwan, broken out into student and club divisions as well as mens and womens teams. This I gleaned from the internet as nobody in our vicinity could make out what was coming from the loudspeakers. Each race was short, but fun to watch. One team member sat in front, facing the rowers beating a drum, keeping the rowers synchronized.
After a few hours at the races, we headed over to check out some of the other activities, which included duck-catching, greased-pole-grab-the-flag, opera, drumming, and shopping.
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