The 2023 Tibetan New Year falls on Feb 21, almost a month after the Spring Festival. The celebration usually starts on the first day of the first month of the Tibetan calendar and ends after 15days. Just like the Spring Festival, the Tibetan New Year marks the perfect opportunity for Tibetans to reunite with their relatives and friends.

With a sweet smell coming from the pot, Tsewang, 74, stirred the soup ladle from time to time at her Singpori home. She was cooking “gutu”, a kind of soup made of flour and a traditional dish for the night of the 29th of the12th month in the Tibetan calendar.

“Gu” in Tibetan means nine, which is a lucky number. “Tu” means “pasta.” Nine different fillings like wool, charcoal and chili a replaced inside the dough drops, and each of these filings has a meaning.

“It is the Tibetan New Year’s Eve tomorrow. The family and relatives will be gathered together and welcoming a warm New Year at the new home,” Tsewang said on Sunday.

For 46-year-old Li Xijun, from northwest China’s Gansu Province, celebrating Tibetan New Year with his wife Drolma Tsering has become a part of his life after living in Tibet for 26 years.

“We celebrate both Spring Festival and Tibetan New Year at home,” he said. Li started his commercial trade business in Tibet after retiring from the army in 1997. He me this wife in 2000, and has since settled in the border county of Yadong to take care of Drolma Tsering’s parents and younger sister.

It is the third Tibetan New Year for Yuan Yubing from Shanghai. Yuan came to Tibet to learn Thangka painting in 2017 and married Losang Samkhar, her studio teacher, the following year.

“I was more of a spectator when I first celebrated the festival,” Yuan said. But after years of living here, Yuan has already known all kinds of customs of the Tibetan New Year.

Yuan and her mother-in-law have cleaned up the windows at home, and all the New Year’s goods are ready. She has even replaced her mother-in-law to cook for the family for New Year’s Eve. “Coming to Tibet makes me feel that my heart has found a home,” she said.

I was born and raised in England in a culture where privacy and “keeping yourself to yourself” were valued traditions. Speaking to strangers was not encouraged. People were most hospitable and friendly.

However, I have been lucky enough to spend some time in both Italy and the US, where I found traditions of hospitality and politeness to be very different.

I experienced Italian hospitality firsthand. On a crowded railway carriage travelling, one afternoon, from Genoa to Florence, sinking gratefully into an empty seat, I was scolded in rapid Italian by a gentleman who was returning to this seat ---- it had not been “spare” after all. I apologized in English, and got up to allow him back into the seat. The gentleman obviously had no understanding of the English language, but he, too, realized my genuine (真诚的) mistake. He smiled and gestured for me to remain in the seat, and he himself remained standing in the corridor for the remainder of the journey. The other occupants of the carriage smiled and nodded at me and made me feel quite welcome amongst them. I feel that if this had been in England, a foreigner who made a mistake would not always be so kindly treated.

Transport also featured in the differences I noticed between English and American culture. I flew to New York on a plane with mainly English passengers. We sat together in near silence. Nobody spoke to me nor, as I expected, to anyone else they did not know. They felt it was not polite to interrupt someone else’s privacy. However, when I travelled across the United States, whether by plane or bus, I was never short of conversation. Conversation was going on all around me and whoever sat next to me was happy to introduce themselves and ask me about myself. They obviously felt it would have been rude not to speak to another person, whether they were strangers or not.

Imagine this: You’re at the movies seeing the latest box-office hit. The leading actor chases down the film’s bad guy before winning over the beautiful leading lady. What does he do next? He sucks on a cigarette.

What’s wrong with this picture? Doesn’t the beautiful woman see her hero’s yellow teeth? Doesn’t she smell his smoky breath? And wouldn’t the good guy have trouble chasing, since smoking causes a person to cough?

But you don’t see any of that when someone smokes cigarettes in the movies. And there is a lot of smoking in movies. Actors light up in more than 50 percent of youth-rated (G, PG, PG-13) movies, according to the American Legacy Foundation, which aims to put an end to smoking among young people. That means that Hollywood is showing 14 billion images of smoking to young people every year.

All that exposure to on-screen smoking can influence teens to smoke. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) argues that 44 percent of teens who begin smoking do so because they’ve seen smoking in movies. The CDC reports that teens are two to three times more likely to start smoking after seeing repeated smoking scenes in movies than teens who are lightly exposed to smoking in movies.

Several organizations are working to remove smoking in youth-rated movies. And adults are not the only ones who care about this issue. Many teens are actively involved. Livia Clandorf, 16, of Chatham, New York, is a member of Reality Check, an organization that educates teens about what it considers to be the manipulative(巧妙处理的) practices of tobacco companies. Livia participated in an event called a “movie stomp(跺脚)”. Reality Check rents out a movie theater and screens a youth-rated film that shows smoking, they stomp their feet and show disapproval by shouting “boo”.