Dragon Boat Festival in Taipei

We got Thursday and Friday off this week for Dragon Boat Festival, a holiday commonly associated with the death of the poet Qu Yuan (but which, in reality, seems to have had a much more complex past, viz. Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_Boat_Festival). According to the story, Qu Yuan drowned himself upon finding out that the state of Qin had captured the capital of his homeland. The locals raced to retrieve his body in their boats, and when they did not find it, threw sticky rice balls in the river so that the fish would not eat the dead poet. Allegedly, the race for Qu Yuan’s body became the dragon boat race, and the rice balls (zongzi) originally fed to the fish became the main food associated with the holiday.

I had never seen a dragon boat race before, so I was obviously very excited when my friend Alison said she was going to compete as part of the NTU rugby team. One of my new flatmates and I went to the Dajia Riverside Park on Friday to watch the race, which – as far as I could tell – consisted of three or four heats, each featuring at most four boats vying to move on to the semi-finals, and subsequently to the finals. The boats had eighteen rowers each, one coxswain, a drummer (to set the rhythm), and a flag catcher, who clung to the head of the dragon at the front of the boat for the entire race, and then reached out to grab the team’s flag at the finish line. The team could not be said to have finished the race until the flag was caught, which was why the lankiest team member was always chosen for the role.  

The races were interesting to see, but we only stayed for about four or five, as the weather became increasingly unbearable and the races themselves started to seem increasingly monotonous. Sadly, Alison’s team did not win, but she did catch the flag and thus fulfilled her role perfectly. As Epictetus says, I think quite relevantly, “There is only one way to happiness, and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will.”

 A dragon boat display
 A close-up of the grounded dragon boat
 The cleaning boat
 One of the boats making its way to the starting line
 Another picture of the same
 The starting line with the city in the background
 A dragon boat returning from the finish line
 Dragon boats with Grand Hotel Taipei in the background 
 More boats returning from the finish line
 Alison's boat (with Alison sitting behind the dragon head) 
 Another picture of the same
 More of the same
  More of the same
 In the heat of the race
 More of the same
 A boat returning from the finish line
 Racers posing for photographs
 More of the same
 More of the same
 The closest race we saw all day
 The spectating area on the left and boats making their way to the finish line on the right
 Grand Hotel Taipei as seen from Dazhi Bridge
Another view of the same

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