Tales of my Chinese Easter part Deux

So, in the last blog, I mentioned going to pay my respects to my friend's ancestor. This time it was not at a cemetary. About a good 30 min. drive from where I'm staying, a drive over to Sun Wan, where I was not too long ago, as posted in another blog, you know, where it was rural, sleepy, and everyone gambles in their spare time? Anyways, it's also where the pineapples and bananas grow in the area.

So we get into the fields, and we climb this big ass hill. Kinda reminds me, I have to do the Grouse Grind back home on Grouse Mountain one of these days. And they start clearing out the brush and make a clearing on a spot where I believe where the ashes of one of their ancestors is burried. And then they make another clearing a few steps down.

So this ritual is a little more traditional. Besides the pouring of tea and wine, and the offering of insense, plus the burning of hell money, we had rice, being thrown on the ground, along with eggs, and various foods. This is the truest ritual that I have seen done, in a while. We couldn't do this at the cemetary, but you could do it here, in the rural hillside. And we just didn't do one spot, we did three spots. This was a big family that gathered, so all ancestors were given their offerings. This was not easy too, as all three spots had to have the brush cleared, and they also had to carry three roasted pigs along, the heaviest being about 50lbs, while the other two were about 10lbs.

When we finished, everyone gathered back at the bottom of the hill, and we cut up the smaller two roast pigs for snacking. The big one was for dinner, though a few people ripped off a hoof or two off of it.

We ended up back into the town, watched people play MJ, rode a bike, which was way too small for me, and watched as the cooks prepared dinner. We had a lot of time to kill.

Dinner was pleasant, though I am not touching anymore of the rice wine again. Burns worst than most of the stuff I normally drink. A lot of chatting, drinking, and more chatting, and me kinda picking up on a few things here and there.

We left a couple hours later, already making plans to go for congee later for late night snacking (commonly done here, as they love their food here, it's a wonder why these people aren't fat yet). We got home to meet up with the rest of the family that didn't come with us (different side as we went to the maternal side of the family's plot) and headed off for the late evening congee. Not gonna bore you with details, but we ended the day with a lot of really good food. Now I just have to work off my gut.