PingXi

PingXi (pronounced, Ping-she) is a cool little town just over an hour from Taipei where an annual Lantern Festival is held every year. When Ashley and Shayn were here we ventured out in the dreary, rainy weather to go check out what PingXi had to offer. We were not disappointed.

The backdrop to our excursion was just beautiful, even despite the rain. The tradition is that you go and buy lanterns, write your hopes and wishes for the year on it, light the lantern and send it up into the sky. We were really excited to give it a try.

Ander's wish for the year: That his two fingers are never too far from his mouth. *granted*

We found this cute Chinese family selling lanterns and they welcomed us in. Their daughter who spoke English wrote Chinese characters for the children to copy and the mom held Ander while we all worked on our lanterns. They were great, you could just tell they are good people. This time the boys did a lantern and the girls did one too. The colors of the lantern are significant as well. I remember that pink is for "good marriage"- but the children were choosing and they didn't care so much about the color's meaning.
As always there is symbolism involved with the tradition. The circle hoop at the bottom of the lantern represents the year, the 4 sections that the wire makes through the middle represent the four seasons and the 12 pieces of kerosene soaked paper represent each of the twelve months of the year.

We went outside and with the help of the Chinese Father and Grandpa, successfully sent off our two lanterns into the sky.

Kohen's reaction in this picture pretty much shows how cool it is to watch the giant lantern float off as far as you can see until it is just a little speck, and then gone.

What you DON'T want to have happen is this ^. This occurred while we were there when some Chinese locals went to send off their lantern and instead it caught fire and burned to the ground without ever lifting off. For as superstitious as the Chinese are, this is very, very bad. The people whose lantern burned pretty much didn't say a word, turned around and solemnly left the area. The fates had decided. No luck for them this year, wishes decidedly not granted.
But lucky for us and Ashley and Shayn, all of our lift offs were nothing less than awesome. You can click here to see more pics on Ashley's blog. The random finale was when we went to leave PingXi, running on fumes. There were no gas stations to be found though locals assured us there was indeed gas though where kept getting lost in translation. After much searching and decoding what we were told we discovered the women we'll call the "Gas Lady" (meant as politely as possible) who literally carried out four 1 litre bottles of gas that she then poured into our tank with a funnel. Definitely got the small town feel with this little gem.

Even though it was COLD and rainy we were so glad we made the effort to check out PingXi.