Russian Superstitions

A big aspect of Russian Taboos is the amount of superstitions involved in their culture. It controls their everyday lives, such as not being able to return back home if you forget something, otherwise you will have bad luck, and if you do return back, you must look at yourself in the mirror before leaving again.

For Russian people, superstitions are taken very seriously and a lot of people abide by them religiously.

As a child growing up with Russian parents, I was raised knowing and taking part in these superstitions. Even till this day I won't whistle indoors as it brings bad luck, as my mother told me.

The article linked below lists many of the Russian superstitions which are well known by all of the Russian community around the world. One of them listed says that you should never celebrate your birthday early. For my entire life my parents wouldn't let me celebrate my birthday the weekend before it actually came up because again it was bad luck to do so. I had to wait until the week after to have a party.

Click here to see the article

My point to this is that superstitions in Russian culture is a big taboo of its own, and revolves around their lives just like a religion would. Of course their are many other countries that have their own superstitions too, so let us know the superstitions you were brought up with in your home.

Chinese Cultural Taboos

This post we are focusing on overall Chinese cultural taboos.


The following link is an interesting article that we found that may arouse your interest.


http://chineseculture.about.com/od/chinesefestivals/a/Chinese-Taboo.htm


It identifies many different Chinese cultural taboos from an everyday perspective, giving examples from work, food, celebrations, gifts etc.


The most amusing thing we found was the idea that you should not leave chopsticks standing up in a bowl of rice in a restaurant, this is because it is believed it will bring bad luck to the owners of the restaurant, as it looks similar to incence sticks being put in an urn used to bring offerings to past ancestors.


In our point of view, living in Australia, putting chopsticks in a bowl of rice is just convenient and more hygienic than placing it on the table.


Tell us what you think?