Bringing in the Year of the Bull

We went here before the 31st, but I had to include this here since it's so amazing. A few days before the 31st, jiefu took us to the Harbin Ice and Snow Festival sculpture garden. It's really more of an urban jungle since everything in the background is, in fact, bigger than most buildings in Santa Barbara or State College, and made of nothing but ice and light bulbs. More on that in another post, hopefully.

For New Year's Eve we went to bofu's house again. He is the "grandfather figure" who gave me the eagle scroll shown in a previous post. (Wei would call him "yifu" which means "mom's older sister's husband" but though I could use the same term, I use bofu now, which means roughly "uncle," however I referred to Wei's dad's closest friends, or usually those older or senior to him, in the same way, literally it's "dad's older brother" . See next note about hierarchy...

Anyway it was bofu's 85th birthday so we made dumplings and had a birthday dinner. We get along great, probably since we were both born in the year of the Rat.

And they corrupted me by showing me how to play majiang (Americans spell it Mahjong). And since bofu is the *real* dumpling shifu, I received some more training in that department. Of course we cooked them up and ate most of them shortly after.

Afterward we were going to go see the snow sculptures that we missed the other night, but instead we went to a rather interesting "dinner and performance" on a Russian themed island in the Song Hua River running through Harbin. That particular experience will require it's own post, which I hope to get to later.


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Majiang ready to go.

Believe it or not, that's a winning hand above. Let's see if I get this right. Essentially: You start with 13 cards, unless you are the house, in which case you have 14 and you get paid double if you win. You choose a card from the deck or the discard of the person just before you (called "eating" their card). In the deck there are three types of cards: circular symbols, stick symbols, and the Chinese number characters, all from 1 to 9.

To win, you need three of a kind in any type, plus three more sets that are either a three-card straight or three of a kind, one from each of the three types, and finally a pair of any type. So that's 4 sets required to win. And there's a card that works as a wild card when it's paired, its the symbol for zhong, or "center." In addition, you need either a 1 or a 9 as part of your hand to win. And when you pick up the final card to win, you will have 14 cards in your winning hand.

The hand above wins because it has a straight in three types (One set for each type: sticks--tiao, round symbols--bing, and number characters--wan. Note that the bird--or phoenix, female symbol for a dragon--is the same as a "one tiao" card.), three of a kind in wan (which also satisfies the requirement to have a 1 or a 9), and a pair of fours in tiao. One thing that made the game difficult for me to pick up in the first few rounds is that while the player turn rotation goes counter clockwise the picking of cards from the deck goes clockwise. Plus it moves *very* fast. And stalling seems to be frowned upon, even among family. No slackers allowed, apparently. :-)

Can any of you card hacks out there tell me which American card game that this most closely resembles? I don't know cards well enough to say, but it seems to play the same role that pinochle did at my dad's mother's table. Anyway I recall "playing" mahjong on old Mac computers. Now I finally know that I had no idea what I was doing.

The real dumpling Shifu, teaching me to "boa jiao zi" or "wrap dumplings."