Dragon Boat Festival

Yesterday (5/31/06) was the Dragon Boat Festival--one of the four big festivals in China.
The night before, one of Josh's students came by the apartment bearing weeds and glutinous rice. He instructed us to hang the weeds on our door to protect ourselves from evil and disease for the rest of the year.

Weeds on door: check.

He also handed over bag full of sticky rice dumplings and said, "Eat these tomorrow".
I found out that a Chinese poet, Chu Yuan, drowned in 277 B.C. and after his death, citizens threw sticky rice into the water so the fish would eat the rice instead of the drowned poet. Nowadays, the rice is eaten by the people themselves.
We steamed a couple and ate them right up. The purple one had dates and peanuts inside. Pretty tastey.















Last night, I was on my way to bed when my dad called, "You didn't eat any sticky rice dumplings today, did you Bets?"

"As a matter of fact I did, Dad. How did you know about the sticky rice?"

"Because I just read an article entitled, China warns of poisonous Dragon Boat dumplings."