Duanwu festival

This last weekend, it was the Dragon Boat Festival, which is celebrated the fifth day of the fifth moon of the Chinese calendar. Supposedly, there are rowing competitions in many rivers, where the boats are decorated as dragons. It is a festival celebrated in Taiwan and mainland China, but also in Korea, Japan or Vietnam. It is probably older than it seems.

As in many other chinese holidays —and not only there—, there is an associated type of food. Its name is "zongzi". They are a kind of dumplings, filled with rice, or pork, or chestnuts, or peanuts, or beef, or maybe vegetarian, etc, wrapped in bamboo leaves.

There appears to be two main kinds in Taiwan, all the variety of filling apart. They are boiled and fried in the North, while they are only boiled in the South. I tried a couple at the ASIAA last Friday, and the southern style ones seem lighter, although they are still heavy rice balls. The landlords of my apartment came on Monday, so I could pay them the rent, and they brought two more. Good, but I can't say it was a light dinner.



I was told that the legend explains that is a holiday honoring a very famous chinese poet (no names, nor dates, nothing, so the effect is grander) who killed himself drowing into a river in desperation for the political situation of the country. People, then, threw rice balls into the river so that fish would not eat his body, . One of the funniest students here has a different version, that is that people threw the balls to feed the poet, but the fish ate the rice. So, they wrap them in bamboo leaves, and fish cannot eat them.