Chinese New Year Celebration

After a long time, finally I have some free time to update my blog. My studies are rather intense these days. I recently finished Business assignment and I was given another one a few days ago, Accounting. But today I want to talk about something new for me, Chinese New Year. 

Before I came to the UK, I didn’t know that much about Chinese New Year. I had just seen celebrations on TV a couple of times, but two weeks ago we celebrated Chinese New Year at INTO. We had a lot of drinks and dumplings. It was fun and I had chance to taste dumplings for the first time. They were extremely delicious.

After that I decided to make a research about this celebration. I found out that it is the most important traditional Chinese holiday. It is also widely known as Lunar New Year or Spring Festival. It is the first day of Chinese lunisolar calendar. In the Gregorian calendar, which is internationally accepted civil calendar, Chinese New Year falls on different dates, a date between January 21 and February 20. In this calendar there are 12 animal zodiacs. This is the year of rabbit. Also there are various traditions about Chinese New Year. On the days before New Year celebration, people clean their houses from top to bottom. It is believed that cleaning sweeps away the bad luck of preceding year and makes their homes ready for good luck. Another important tradition is red envelops. These envelops generally contain money and are given from elderly people or married couples to young people or children.

When I found myself doing a research about Chinese New Year, I noticed that studying at INTO didn’t only make contribution to my knowledge about my subjects; also studying at this kind of environment where there are students all around the world, helps me to learn about different cultures and life styles. This awareness also helped me to develop a further complaisance.

Normally I don’t like travelling to long distances, however now I am really curious about different cultures and I want to visit different countries to have a better understanding about their cultures. In that case I am really lucky, because most of my friends from INTO invited me to their home countries for summer holiday. I think it is still too early to make a summer holiday plan since we have assignments and exams before us but I prepared a list of countries that I want to visit, a good first step.