Tet Festival - Los Angeles Hotels .com

During the Lunar New Year, which falls sometime at the end of January to early February, LA's vibrant Vietnamese community puts on a large-scale, three-day celebration known as the Tet Festival. The festival's name means "Feast of the First Morning" and represents a fresh start on a new year of luck and the beginning of spring (xuan).

Corresponding to the {{Chinese New Year]], the LA Tet Festival offers entertainment, food, and cultural activities traditional to Vietnam as well as other Asian countries. Highlights include dragon dancers, traditional music, pageants, singing contests, children's costume contests, flower arrangement demonstrations, Chinese Chess tournaments, and cultural booths.

Food is an important component of the Tet Festival, and visitors can enjoy specialties such as pickled vegetables, roasted watermelon seeds, dried and candied coconut, and bahn chung and bahn day -- stuffed sticky rice concoctions wrapped in banana leaves and ceremonially prepared for the holiday.

Since 1982, the Union of Vietnamese Student Associations (UVSA) of Southern California has put on an LA Tet Festival in Garden Grove Park, not far from Long Beach. Admission is $5 for adults, $4 for kids, and free for those in traditional Vietnamese costume.

URL: http://www.tetfestival.org