Western New Year's

I have a pen pal from Portugal and we found out that Americans have holidays almost once a month. January New Year's, February Valentine's Day, March St. Patrick's, April Fools or Easter, Mother's Day, you get the picture. While living in China I found they have a ton of holidays too including two New Year's. The first New Year celebration is the western one and the second is based on the lunar calender and falls usually in February or March. This year we got a three day weekend for western New Year's and I had co-workers invite me out. Here is what we did.

The place I went for New Year's was Mogan Shen. Shen means mountain so it is Mogan Mountain. The mountain is named after two families who were united from a marriage. (Cute) The families lived on the mountain and when the Chinese people were almost taken over by a neighboring kingdom Mo's family and Gan's family became the most kick butt army ever and wiped out the terrorizing kingdom (cute?).  They were excellent at sword making and fighting and have a reputation that lives on to this day. On the mountain you will see a statue of the couple, the wife carrying a sword for battle and her husband holding a hammer. (Relationship goals, am I right?)

We first arrived at our rented house. There were nine people on the trip so they thought to rent a three story house and it was super nice. The house seemed like it was just built and get this, every bedroom has a private bathroom. How great is that?!  It was freezing when we got there because the renters opened up all the windows for some reason, so that night for supper we actually ate in our winter coats. The neat thing about renting houses like this is that the land owners will ask you to bring groceries and then they make all the food and do all the dishes. It is great! We made hot pot that night and it was good. Items in our hot pot included meat balls, pork, lamb, beef lung, tofu, duck blood that is solidified into cubes (I skipped that), and puffy bread. My favorite was the puffy bread that you dip in the hot pot soup.
We closed all the windows and blasted the heat that night and from then on the house was cozy.

The next day we hiked up Mogan Shen which was lovely. Pictures are posted on my instagram for you to see. There is a cottage that Mao stayed at (the founder of Chinese communism) on top of the mountain along with a Korean restaurant (which is weird because the Koreans tried to conquer China a few times so not many people like them.) There are several ponds and little waterfalls along the trail which makes it like a fairy tale. There were a ton of vendors alongside the trail selling hard boiled eggs, pumpkin seeds, dessert rice bread (purple and delicious), and chips.

Final day we ate rice porridge and hard boiled eggs for breakfast and went bamboo shoot hunting. The land owners gave our group two picks to dig up the shoots with and showed us the trail they like to use for bamboo shoot hunting. They showed us berries we could pick and eat including wild strawberries, which they were all too small to eat since it is winter. We hiked up some narrow pathways into the bamboo forest. Never being in a bamboo forest before, this was neat. I learned that Mogan mountain even sends its bamboo to panda thriving areas since they have so much. Sadly, it was too cold for shoots to be growing so we found none. We headed back to the house and grilled and made hot pot for lunch. Items we grilled included pork, beef, lettuce, and squid. The squid was a bit chewy for me but everything else was yummy.
We drove back to Jiaxing after that. Someday, I hope to find a bamboo shoot in the forest. We will see.