Northern Vietnam Filled with Festival Excitement Despite Cold Weather Options

[XigonCongchua]

The first month of a lunar calendar is a prime time for festivals in Vietnam. Hundred of thousand push their way through the crowded streets in a shivering weather in order to take part in the many traditional festivals.


Vật Cầu Festival - Shirtless men competing in a traditional sport match in 12C weather
http://vnexpress.net/gl/xa-hoi/2012/01/tha...-trong-gia-ret/

Thổi Cơm Festival
http://vnexpress.net/gl/xa-hoi/2012/01/thi...m-bang-bep-rom/

Đống Đa Festival
http://vnexpress.net/gl/xa-hoi/2012/01/ngu...hoi-go-dong-da/

Chùa Hương Festival - Tens of thousand try to make their way to Chua Huong in rain and cold
http://vnexpress.net/gl/xa-hoi/2012/01/doi...hoi-chua-huong/
http://vnexpress.net/gl/xa-hoi/2012/01/han...hoi-chua-huong/

Chém lợn Festival
http://vnexpress.net/gl/xa-hoi/2012/01/hoi...-lon-dau-nam-1/

Chạy lợn Festival (this is different from the above, the don't cut the pig up I think)
http://vnexpress.net/gl/xa-hoi/2012/01/le-...y-lon-o-ha-noi/

Tây Hồ Festival
http://vnexpress.net/gl/xa-hoi/2012/01/che...-le-phu-tay-ho/

Yên Tử Festival
http://vnexpress.net/gl/xa-hoi/2012/02/han...hai-hoi-yen-tu/

[Daehan]

Chém lợn Festival
http://vnexpress.net/gl/xa-hoi/2012/01/hoi...-lon-dau-nam-1/

no comment...

2:40-end
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbPFVbvdlqA...feature=related

[XigonCongchua]

Poor pig. It was supposed to be dead in the first hack.

Looks disturbing, but how do you think your pork ended up on your table? lol

These festivals are very very very old. Before there was prepared meat and stuff, people slaughtered animals alive all the times, and this was normal to them back in those days. Now animal slaughtering still happens but it's "behind the scene" so you don't it much, but just because it isn't exposed to your eyes, it doesn't mean it didn't happen.

Looks like most Vietnamese commentators find this to be distasteful and propose to replace the real pig with a fake pig - to preserve tradition and to appease the public at the same time.

[freeter]

Thanks for the link to Yen Tu. I have never been there, but it is exactly what I imagine it would be every time I hear "Mênh mênh mang mang Phù Vân Yên Tử".

[freeter]

Thai Binh will not organize Khai An Den Tran ceremony this year.

http://dantri.com.vn/c20/s20-561514/thai-b...an-den-tran.htm

Thai Binh and Nam Dinh have each year both organized the ceremony (albeit in competition with each other). I guess Thai Binh decides to be the greater man and step out of the pointless fight. Though I believe the two should instead create a joint festival since the Tran dynasty originated from their region.

On another note, I felt sorry for my granduncle. He flew to Vietnamese last week hoping to get the auspicious stamp of the royal seal from his home province (I always find it's weird that he doesn't refer to Thai Binh as Tinh/province but rather as Phu/prefecture).

This post has been edited by freeter: Feb 1 2012, 11:29 PM

[LonelyLeopard]

lol and now pig can not be killed, well i guess its better for those who opposed to eat veggies all their life, huh naive...

[GoBears]

Chém lợn Festival
http://vnexpress.net/gl/xa-hoi/2012/01/hoi...-lon-dau-nam-1/

Whatever happened to mercy killing? Have the people become so desensitized that they have no feeling for the victims? Give thanks and respect to the animals that become our bodies when we feed on them. Public mocking, teasing, and torturing the animals before death is no entertainment. Give them a quick, painless, and quiet death.

[wnch]

Whatever happened to mercy killing? Have the people become so desensitized that they have no feeling for the victims? Give thanks and respect to the animals that become our bodies when we feed on them. Public mocking, teasing, and torturing the animals before death is no entertainment. Give them a quick, painless, and quiet death.

Phú quý sinh lễ nghĩa. It's unavoidable that some of these are a little perverse

[XigonCongchua]

Whatever happened to mercy killing? Have the people become so desensitized that they have no feeling for the victims? Give thanks and respect to the animals that become our bodies when we feed on them. Public mocking, teasing, and torturing the animals before death is no entertainment. Give them a quick, painless, and quiet death.

Well four things:

1. First, as I said, this festival is an ancient one. How do you think people got their pork back then? You think the meat were cut up into nice clean slices packed in plastic containers and stored in fridges of supermarkets for you to come and pick up like today? No. They had to kill the pig themselves. So this was normal to them.

2. Just because you're not exposed to such animal slaughtering scenes, it doesn't mean animal slaughtering scenes don't occur and you're free of guilt. Next time you get a pack of pork from the supermarket, you may as well try to think about how the meat get there. Or when you're out eating your McDonald stuff. Or when you wear fur or leather boots or jackets. Think about how they get there. Is everything fine as long as you don't see the animals get killed? Knowing they're slaughtered for your commodities, but pretending like you don't know and used your fake etiquette to judge a traditional festival of others, aren't you a hypocrite? If you're not a hypocrite, then you're just ignorant. In other words, you're living in a bubble, and you use your sense in the bubble to judge people outside of the bubble

3. Public mocking and teasing? What are you talking about? This pig chopping act is NOT for entertainment, people aren't happy, excited or entertained by watching it. It is done just because it's part of the ceremony.

4. Yes, the pig was supposed to be dead after one chop, so it's quick enough, better than skinning it alive, which many do you know. (Sometimes incompetency of chopper may cause problems, that's when it's sad because it will require two hacks like in the vid, but it's not the intention of the ceremony to make the pig suffer)



I googled about this festival and came across this
http://www.chinasmack.com/2012/pictures/li...e-festival.html
Most comments there are crap and inflammatory but there are some sensible ones that I agree

Anyway I don’t see what the big deal is.

Looked like a quick, clean kill. What do you think happens in slaughterhouses? The same thing. It’s not like they tortured the pig.

100% agree. In Hunan a couple of skinny guys hold the pig down, stick a sword into the chest (hoping they get the heart) and then wait up to 20 minutes for the thing to stop running around due to blood loss. while still alive, but just barely, is when they start shaving the hair off and begin gutting. i have seen it many times.

dim mak – I was going to say the same thing. We urban dwellers buy our meat in a highly sanitised fashion from the butcher or supermarket and conveniently forget that some animal had to die for our meal. This pig died quickly, and any suffering would have been confined to some loud squealing before it was chopped in half.

I think few if any of the people criticising the ceremony have actually slaughtered an animal themselves. When I was young, chickens did not come frozen from the supermarket. You bought a live one from the local market and killed it by slitting its throat at home. The first time I did this, I didn’t feel hungry at dinner time. But I learned that animals die so that we can eat, and we have an obligation to minimise its suffering when they are despatched.

^ Yeah...Even in Vietnam today, many families still have to slaughter chickens themselves (if they want fresh meat). I've seen it so many times. Don't you know that in Vietnam, they sell live chickens in the market, and you buy them home, and you slit their throats, and skin them.

McDonald’s; KFC; Pizza Hut; all of them. “Making money in a corporation like McDonald’s is not simple at all! Behind every sandwich there is a complex process that begins” with a dead animal. Any poster who eats meat and complains about this is resting firmly hypocrisy. But that’s okay.

To be honest, I’ve seen worse pictures from slaughter houses. The only thing that makes it controversial is that they aren’t doing it behind close doors for everyone to think $hits all la-de-da and whatnot. Before anyone says who’s barbaric, they should take a look at how their country kills the meat.

Sums up my points well.


However, I do want to pig to be replaced with a fake one. It's just heart-stricken for me, but that's my personal problem. I don't judge these villagers.

[freeter]

The link I got from Dantri e-news was worse though. It showed that people was excited dipping their money and washing their hands in the blood (only some fanatics of course).

http://dantri.com.vn/c20/s20-560224/neu-bi...em-chem-lon.htm

[XigonCongchua]

They believe the blood from the pig chopped in the ceremony will bring luck. Vietnamese are a bunch of superstitious as usual.

[oolong]

Just think this,animals eat other animals that are smaller and weaker.Always make me feel better when im eating pork,beef or shark fin.

[freeter]

Pigs are omnivores and cows are purely herbivores though. Nonetheless, the strategy could be used to justify eating dogs, lol.

More on Vietnamese festivals. This article is about a Vietnamese traditional game in central Vietnam that is similar to live lotto calling.

http://dantri.com.vn/c20/s20-560231/khach-...-mien-trung.htm


@Xigon: the link to the Chinese website makes me feel quite unease. I agree that the chopping was graphic, but I don't think they have any right to call our people barbarians or anything along that line. I remember when the video about little YueYue died in a hit and run incident in Hainan surfaced, most Vietnamese web-browsers just expressed their sympathy for her family and denounced the truck drivers as well as the pedestrians; no one was calling Chinese barbarians or anything like that. At least the pig here died off the bat instead of lying there waiting for the moment to come.

This post has been edited by freeter: Feb 3 2012, 03:23 AM

[oolong]

Tiexue is a forum for ultranationalists,their opinoins dont represent the general population .I read the original post its not half as bad as Chinasmack made it seem to be.

[capricon2]

Eating and abusing defenseless animals won't bring you any closer to God. Remember, hell is hot and it's FOREVERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR.

[XigonCongchua]

Funny I got no problem with the pig chopping act (though I wouldn't want to look)

What I have problem with is people thinking the blood from the pig chopped in this act would bring them luck. It's not just the old people, but the younger ones also kinda believe it.

Sometimes the superstitious level of Vietnamese people makes me feel uneasy.


Anyway, now we know why Vietnamese had the saying "Tháng giêng là tháng ăn chơi" (First lunar month is the month of amusement/festivity) Because the first lunar month is full of festive events.




BTW do you know which one is the original version of this folk poem? 'Cause I saw so many versions of it

One goes like this

Tháng giêng là tháng ăn chơi,
Tháng hai trồng đậu, trồng khoai, trồng cà.
Tháng ba thì đậu đã già,
Ta đi ta hái về nhà phơi khô.
Tháng tư đi tậu trâu bò,
Để ta sắm sửa làm mùa tháng năm.
Sáng ngày đem thóc ra ngâm,
Bao giờ mọc mầm, ta sẽ vớt ra.
Gánh đi ta ném ruộng ta,
Đến khi lên mạ thì ta nhổ về.
Sắp tiền mượn kẻ cấy thuê.
Cấy xong rồi mới trở về nghỉ ngơi.
Cỏ lúa dọn đã sạch rồi,
Nước ruộng vơi mười còn độ một, hai.
Ruộng thấp đóng một gầu giai,
Ruộng cao thì phải đóng hai gầu sòng
Chờ cho lúa có đòng đòng,
Bây giờ ta sẽ trả công cho người.
Bao giờ cho đến tháng mười,
Ta đem liềm hái ra ngoài ruộng ta.
Gặt hái ta đem về nhà,
Phơi khô quạt sạch ấy là xong công.


Another goes like this

Tháng Chạp thì mắc trồng khoai,
Tháng Giêng trồng đậu, tháng hai trồng cà.
Tháng ba cày bở ruộng ra,
Tháng tư bắc mạ, thuận hoà mọi nơi.
Tháng năm gặt hái vừa rồi,
Bước sang tháng sáu, nước trôi đầy đồng.
Nhà nhà vợ vợ chồng chồng,
Đi làm ngoài đồng, sá kể sớm trưa...
Tháng sáu, tháng bảy, khi vừa,
Vun trồng giống lúa, bỏ chừa cỏ tranh.
Tháng tám lúa giỗ đã đành,
Tháng mười cắt hái cho nhanh kịp người.
Khó khăn làm mấy tháng trời,
Lại còn mưa nắng thất thời khổ trông!
Cắt rồi nộp thuế nhà công,
Từ rày mới được yên lòng ấm no.


And these are versions from the Mekong delta
http://www.taberd75.com/linh%20tinh/OMienTay.htm


They all depict the life in 12 months of the year of Vietnamese, but each depiction is different.

[XigonCongchua]

Another Festival Celebrated today
http://vnexpress.net/gl/xa-hoi/2012/02/tie...en-ba-chua-kho/

But seriously Vietnamese need to learn to be more....I hate using this word but..."civilized"

I hate seeing how they always push each other in such crowded mobs to get to a temple or something for the festival.

[XigonCongchua]

LOL almost everyday there's a festival

Phết Hiền Quan Festival celebrated today
http://vnexpress.net/gl/xa-hoi/2012/02/tra...-pha-cuop-phet/

Looks fun.

[Boron]

lol. why does this festival involve people walking through mud?

Do you the Yi ethnic have a festival, where the men in the village touch the girls' breasts? true story.



This post has been edited by Boron: Feb 5 2012, 03:11 PM

[XigonCongchua]

It's because of the rainy weather, the ground became muddy.

They're supposed to get the "phết hiền quan" thing and bring it somewhere, they're fighting over it. Whoever got it is the winner. Participants in the game are mostly young men.

It's kinda like American football I guess, except they don't have teams. I don't know much about the rules.

Here are the stuff that they're supposed to get