Dragon Boat Day

I always used to think the Czech holidays were pretty boring. Christian festivals, Saints' days, independence day, the guys who brought Christianity and Cyrillic alphabet into our pagan lands (though nowadays we don't use Cyrillic and most people are not Christian). Life abroad and having to explain some of my country's traditions made me revisit this a bit. One holiday is for Jan Hus, a guy who got tricked to travel to Germany 'for a little chat' and once there, got arrested and burnt. Mikuláš sounds extremely obscure from the Far East, with loads of angels, devils and old bearded men swarming the streets. I tend to avoid explaining our Easter traditions nowadays, because that inevitably freaks people out. Still, most of these days are welcome mostly because that means not having to go to school or work.

The Chinese, on the other hand, have cool sounding holidays. Lantern festival, Moon festival, Buddha's birthday, Dragon Boat Holiday, they all sound incredibly exotic, oriental and mystical. I wouldn't be surprised if they also meant not much more than a day off for the locals, but the foreigners love these festivals, thinking that they are really getting in touch with the local culture.



We just had the Dragon Boat holiday here last week. A background legend first:

Many centuries ago, a man named Qu Yuan lived in the Zhou dynasty. He worked as a minister. He was honest, just and smart, and the common people loved him. However, the other officials in the kingdom were jealous of this man, and somehow they managed to persuade the emperor to remove him from office and kick him out of the country. Qu Yuan went into exile and lived there for several years. Later, another empire invaded the Zhou dynasty and conquered it. Qu Yuan still loved his country and couldn't bear to watch it. So he jumped into a river and drowned himself. The people, who still remembered what a great man he was, jumped on boats and went on the river, where he drowned. They beat drums to scare the fish away, so that they wouldn't eat his body. They also threw rice cakes into the water, so that the fish would eat them, rather than the corpse.



During the Dragon Boat festival as it is today, hundreds of boat races are held throughout the Chinese world. All it really is is crews on long, narrow boats decorated with dragon motives racing against others over a distance to grab a flag at the end of the course. Each boat has a drum and a drummer, who is trying to make sure the paddling is synchronized. Pretty straightforward. Some crews were trying hard, some took it easy, some quit right after the start. There were really good ones, as well as really sloppy ones, who ignored their drummer and kept hitting others' paddles.



I went to see the races in Dajia park, close to Taipei's Grand Hotel (above). It was indeed an interesting cultural experience although one only has to see a handful of races to see it all. That comes from the position of a spectator, I'm sure it's much more thrilling to actually be on the boat. One thing that struck me was the huge amount of foreigners taking part in the races and in the audience. That proves my theory that the locals mostly don't care and are happy to have a day off, whereas the foreigners see this as an opportunity to really immerse in the local culture. Everyone I spoke to thought it was really worth the blood, sweat and tears of the hard, long practices. All I can say is my usual mantra: Maybe next year, I could do this too.