How expats celebrated Chinese Spring Festival in 2015

Tendaishe Changamire is a Zimbabwean post-graduate student doing a Chinese major in Renmin University of China. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]

The 2015 Spring Festival, which is probably the last one I will spend in China, was wonderful.

I ate until midnight, watched the annual Spring Festival Gala, learned how to make dumplings, took a wonderful dip in the hot springs in Jiaozuo and had lunch with Buddhist monks. This year's holiday was unique and spectacular.

Two weeks before the festival, my boyfriend and I tried to buy tickets to Wuhan (the capital city of Hubei province) to meet my best friend. But it was too late to get the tickets.

A Chinese friend from Jiaozuo (a small city in northwestern Henan province) invited us to spend the holiday with his family. With a stroke of luck, we managed to get two train tickets to travel to Zhengzhou on Feb 18. Our trip to Zhengzhou was comfortable. The Beijing railway station was not as crowded as we had imagined and the train was not even full. I suppose it was because many Chinese had already traveled to their hometowns.

We set out from Beijing West Railway station at 5:30 pm. The trip took three and a half hours. We took a taxi from Zhengzhou to Jiaozuo and watched fireworks along the way.

When we arrived at my friend's home, we got a very warm welcome and a lovely dinner cooked by our friend's uncle, who had worked for a long time as a chef in a five-star hotel.

We stayed with the family until midnight and then went outside to set off fireworks and firecrackers.

For the first time since I came to China, I actually appreciated the noisy firecrackers. I also learned that Spring Festival is called guonian in Mandarin, which means passing over (guo) a mythical beast (nian) to drive out the bad luck. The beast is scared of the color red and firecrackers. It was a beautiful night with all the illuminations decorating the sky.

We went to bed around 2 am, exhausted but excited for the next day. As expected, we woke up a little bit late the next day. I learned to make dumplings for breakfast. It was a really challenging task, but I liked the learning process. I made about 10 bad ones, which opened up when cooked, but at least I did a better job than my boyfriend.

After that, our Chinese friend took us to a local hot spring resort. We were the only foreigners there, but we never got any uncomfortable stares like in Beijing. Some people asked to take pictures with us and we did. It was very comfortable, relaxing and fun.

The third day, we woke up to the sound of people chatting and laughing loudly. We realized we had overslept again, and the family (about 20 people) were already ready to go to lunch. We showered quickly and joined then in a motorcade to go to a hotpot restaurant for lunch. This was amazing, and it felt very warm being around family and made me miss home a little bit.

Our friend had to travel to another nearby city on business. So in the afternoon, he drove us to Kaifeng where we were met by another friend who helped us book a hotel.

Kaifeng is famous for its snacks, so we went to The Small City, a building that sells different kinds of food. It was amazing and reminded me of the South African Monte casino because of its ceiling, which resembles a blue sky. It was crowded and we couldn't find a place to sit so we walked around and tried different foods. We tried a lot of food including donkey meat, but my favorite was pineapple rice.

On the last day of our trip, we set off to visit Daxiangguo Temple, a famed Buddhism temple built around 1,500 years ago. A monk was waiting for us, and he gave us a tour of the temple and educated us on the history of it. We also lighted incense and kowtowed to the Buddha statues.

I'm Christian and my boyfriend is Muslim but we were really honored to learn about another religion and their practices. I was also excited to learn about meditation. We were also very honored to receive an invitation to have lunch in the monks' dining room together with them.

It was an impressive experience. The temple's food included mantou (steamed buns), rice and surou (bean curd dish that tastes like meat). It was a very humble but delicious lunch.