I finally figured out a way to get pictures onto my computer from my camera. Mark: 1, Computer: 0. So, here’s some impressions from Chinese New Year for you from my first week here (already seems so long ago!).
First off, unlike our New Year’s Eve celebration, Chinese New Year is actually a two week holiday where most people travel back to their home towns from wherever they live to be with their extended families. It’s a little more like our Christmas to them (or possibly Thanksgiving for my American readers, I hear that’s bigger than Christmas in some families for gathering toether). In any case, New Year’s Eve is spent with family cooking and eating food. You stay up till midnight, and they have a live tv broadcast from a theatre in Beijing that makes you realize why the opening/closing ceremonies at the olympics was as eye popping and epic as they did – it’s just how the Chinese celebrate. It’s something like 5 hours of skits, dances, dramatizations, comedy routines, and lots of famous hosts, all of it quite flamboyant and extravagant. The big official fireworks shows are the next night, not on New Years Eve itself. That said, there are plenty of fireworks going off for the whole 2 weeks of the festival since you can buy them everywhere for next to nothing, and your neighbourhood still explodes at midnight. Here in Guangzhou they are known for their flowers, so on New Year’s Eve day they have a HUGE flower festival and it’s tradition for every household to buy some flowers to decorate for the festivities – same idea as a Christmas tree I guess. Here’s some shots:
Amidst your standard array of colorful beauty you’d expect to find at a flower festival, there are also brightly colored…fuzzy plants, bamboo pirate ships, and flowers that look like lemon bushes:
Entire shops of things that explode, some of which are taller than me! The best is when the guy minding the stall is smoking.
Which happens frequently.
No celebration is complete without feasting – here I’m stuffing and folding dumplings by hand (loves the dumplings!), trying some local snack food (cooked and sold in banana leaves), laughing at Chinese translations on menus (can you find it?), and enjoying good fellowship the Chinese way – lots of food and tea but no elbow room!
Family outing through the epic misty mountains of China (but all my shots were of the scenery and architecture…woops). My favorite is the dragon in the ceiling.
The red lantern that hangs from every lamp post, wishing everyone Gong Xi Fa Cai!
And finally, we detonate the sky. Happy year of the cow!
