WORDS ON THE STREET 70th anniversary of Hanoi's Liberation Day Vietnam - Asia 2023 Smart City Summit Hanoi celebrates 15 years of administrative boundary adjustment 12th Vietnam-France decentrialized cooperation conference 31st Sea Games - Vietnam 2021 Covid-19 Pandemic
Feb 10, 2018 / 13:56

Quang Ba flower market among 14 best places to celebrate Lunar New Year

CNN has selected Hanoi’s most popular flower market to among 14 best destinations to celebrate Lunar New Year.

As written in the CNN’s article: “One essential must-have for Vietnam's Lunar New Year, or Tet, is a bunch of flowers and Hanoi's Quang Ba flower market works at a frenetic pace during the festival.
Shoppers seek out the most eye-catching bouquets (usually peach blossom or ochna integerrima, the bright yellow blossom favored during Tet) amid the whirr and screech of the city's ubiquitous motorcycles, all transporting bright bunches of flowers on their pillions.
The sights and sounds mixed with the fragrance of street food makes for a heady New Year sensual overload.”
Illustrative photo
Illustrative photo
Quang Ba Flower Market, Au Co Street, Tay H, Hanoi, Vietnam; open daily from about 3 a.m.
Other prestigious names in the list are Sha Tin Racecourse (Hong Kong), Gyeongbokgung Palace (South Korea), Raohe Night Market/Wu Lao Guo (Taipei), Studio City (Macau) etc.
The Lunar New Year, or the Spring Festival usually lasts for 15 days from the first day of the lunar calendar (February 16 in 2018), and is the time when families get together to ring in the changes.
In Vietnam, Lunar New Year (Tet/Tet Nguyen Dan) is the most important and popular holiday and festival in Vietnam. It is the Vietnamese New Year marking the arrival of spring based on the Lunar calendar, a lunisolar calendar. The name Tet Nguyen Dan is Sino-Vietnamese for Feast of the very First Morning.
Many Vietnamese prepare for Tet by cooking special holiday foods and cleaning their house. There are a lot of customs practiced during Tet such as visiting a person’s house on the first day of the new year (xông nhà), ancestral worship, wishing New Year’s greetings, giving lucky money to children and elderly people and opening a shop.
During Tet, Vietnamese visits their relatives and temples, forgetting the troubles of the past year and hoping for a better upcoming year. They consider Tet to be the first day of spring and the festival is often called Hội xuân (spring festival).