Lunar New Year
- Taipei Insiders
- May 17, 2020
- 2 min read
By June
How well do you know about Lunar New Year?
Lunar New Year is also commonly known as Chinese New Year or Spring Festival across East Asia and for Chinese descendants in other parts of the world. For Taiwanese, this festival is an opportunity to take a week off work to reunite with their families, relatives and friends in their hometown. For foreign travellers who are visiting Taiwan during this period, they are fortunate to experience the unique festive ambience diffusing in the air especially in Taipei Metropolitan area. Streets, shoplets and shopping malls or complexes are decorated with red lanterns and beautiful lighting to enrich the atmosphere. If you keen to look for some tasty traditional New Year pastries and dishes, this is the right time for you to hop on a food tour in the streets to try out a variety of budget-friendly restaurants or food courts. Also, this is the big sales season in many shopping centers and mostly hold activities to give out Chinese New Year Hamper gifts and baskets. At certain places in Taipei will organize a countdown event on the Chinese New Year Eve and embrace the first day of Chinese New Year. Therefore, you can get to appreciate fireworks astonishingly blasting into the night sky accompanied with joyful cheerings.
Moreover, it is recommended to visit at least one of the famous temples in Taipei to witness the rowdy environment during the first few days of the celebration. Locals swarm to the temples to seek for New Year blessings from the mythical deities and visitors also able to engage with the local customs and traditions in multifold ways such as joining parade of deities, learn to make some authentic New Year dishes through workshops, learn the praying process in a Taoist temple and so forth.
Edited by June Lye
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