during this festival people make this colored sticky rice. they use leaves, roots and flowers to color it. every home we wen into offered us this as a snack. and when we were leaving people all came out to wish us off and each of them gave us a bag of rice - needless to say our bags were quite a bit heavier on the way out!
black, yellow and purple are the traditional rice colors - last night i made some mango sticky rice out of some of the huge supply we tok home
another part of this festival is the tomb sweeping (which is very similar to the qing ming jie - tomb sweeping day that the Han Chinese celebrate). we took a 30 min walk with the family we were staying with out into the fields and found the tombs, which they cleaned, decorated and offered food to (the food wasn't left there just set down then taken back).
the main food that they eat at this festival is chicken. every family will kill at least one chicken. the people are very poor and because of the drought have very little food. there were no vegtables in the whole village. we had brought in live chickens and vegtables with us so the place we stayed had some. on that day we ate about 7 meals. people would come pick us up from one house and take us to their house to eat a boiled chiken soup with a hot dipping sauce. at the wealthiest home we went to they also had beer and homeade tou fu in the soup. we learned that when there is no food they can either go out to a market (45 min walk on certain days of the month) to buy some, or more often than that they just eat rice with chopped up hot peppers in it.
it is custom to give the youngest person at the table the biggest chicken leg. so each place we went they gve it to Caed - who does not eat chicken (or meat for that matter) even when i make it! so it was pretty funny trying to get him to hold and even taste chicken leg after chicken leg... he did love drinking the soup and eating the rice though!
