Tuesday, 1 April 2008

alrighty! this month is april and we are honouring panic at the disco!!!

yes, the beautiful boys from vegas have come out with a new album which.. you all know the name of because i have been talking about it nonstop. yeah. so whatever it is you want to do to talk about them or how you feel about them just email me or something and i'll put up what you want to say. or if its short you can put it on the tagboard. i know this is kind of a weird thing but i know, i know, my blog is getting boring. so i have to do something to make you guys read it.

today.. in case you didn't know, it is april the 1st. this means that it is april fools day. as your friend, i advise you guys to be careful and hopefully no mean trick will befall you. you may think that it is in my nature to try to trick people but sadly, my nature is for some reason telling me not to. i feel too tired to anyway. i can't think of any trick worth playing on someone.

so, today i went for ching ming, or some of you may not it, cheng meng. there are other variations but i do not know them. ok so for those of you unfamiliar with the term, it is a chinese tradition that we do every year when we visit the graves of our ancestors. what we do when we visit : first we clean up the graves. some graves are kind of in the middle of the jungle so wild plants tend to grow on the graves. i don't know why but people always go and burn the friggin plants. ok. so after we clean it, we put these strips or small pieces of coloured paper on the grave. it symbolises money, so that wherever the dead are they will have money to buy stuff. then, everybody is given 6 joss sticks.the speaker, usually a senior member of the family, will say a few words in prayer kind of like praying that the deceased will be happy and have a good and enjoyable afterlife. then each person would put 3 sticks in a container filled with soil in the front of the grave, and three behind the grave. if the grave is like all soil then there's no container. i don't really know what that represents though. then, we will burn stuff. there is usually a place where we can burn papers and different paper items that symbolise different things. we burn some coloured paper and mini cardboard houses and cars and whatnot, and supposedly whatever you burn will reach them in heaven in real size. it's quite interesting, really. usually we offer some food to the dead as well. but we don't burn it. the normal sutff ispink and yellow muffins and fruits. but today i saw chicken rice and cha sao rice at other tombs. and i learnt something else today. an old tradition for scaring ghosts away from the tombs is having some cloth that's covered in chicken blood on top of the tomb stone. apparently ghosts are afraid of blood. these days we don't do that, but people sell paper with red ink blots on them and we put that on the tombstone and put a rock on top so it doesn't fly away. so the next time you visit a chinese graveyard you'll see a lot of rocks on top of the tombstones.