端午节

Ah, today is the fifth day of the fifth lunar month. 五月初五.

This marks a festival - the Dragon Boat Festival or something. A lot of dumpling making and eating to commemorate the day Qu Yuan 屈原, some ancient Chinese hero who jumped off a cliff. He was maligned by other Chinese officials and guess what, I'm unsure of what exactly happened.

But anyway, because he had respect from the people, they wrapped dumplings into the river so that fish can eat them instead of the corpse and they rowed out boats into the sea to find Qu Yuan's body. So that's how the whole thing came about.

Did this festival cost you anything? Well, to me it did. It cost me:

An entire shelf in the fridge, plus a third of the space in the drawer of the fridge.



Poor bottle of kaya which had nowhere to stand but lie on top of a fish.

This is not bad already, I think my mum made more than that but she gave them out to relatives. Enough for five or six other families. But so far since Monday I only ate two. Not that I don't like my mum's dumplings or what, I don't really like this year's flavours that's all.