Chinese New Year a.k.a. Spring Festival a.k.a. Lunar New Year

went to my fav duck place, Da Dong. It is still the best. This vegetable formed into a round cake was called "chinese toon"


asparagus soup with sea urchin was yummy.

ok on to Chinese new year. Usually you spend chinese new year at home with your family watching the TV special galas and eating a huge meal. So it was awesome that Lily #2 invited Lily #1 and me to their dinner and stuff or else I would be eating noodles somewhere and crying and shaking like a little girl in the corner as the fireworks exploded around me. Lily #2's fam lives in a pretty nice place. her dad gardens a lot and has a greenhouse somewhere. is that small tree an azalea? i couldnt remember when they were asking me.

everything is in excess on this night so there was way too much food. that yellow thing on the side is like a lemon he said and you can't eat it, it's called a "buddah's hand"

the spread, complete with expensive bai jiu, wine, beer, hot pot, fish, and 4 other kinds of meat.

everyone says it is a tradition to watch the TV specials. they are big galas of comedians doing skits, singers singing songs, dancers dancing, acrobats acrobating etc.... at first i thought what the heck, chinese new year is supposed to be all cultural and stuff but then i guess if you look at it we americans sit around and watch the christmas story and it's a wonderful life all day on xmas.


they spent a good amount of time sending and recieving happy spring festival texts, which is the peak time in the year so it's hard to get any messages out because the network is super overloaded.


it's just lily #2's mom, dad and her in the house.

and then they wanted me to draw them, which i always reluctantly do because i don't draw people very nicely. my trademarks are big red noses, bag under the eyes, jowls, and just overall unflattering distortion.


lots of these boxes with tubes that shoot out the fireworks. fireworks are pretty violent. super loud, they rain down debris and burninated stuff on you. sometimes they rain down burning embers. i got one on the back of my head and ran away screaming like a little girl. I would be lying if i said it wasn't a little scary with all the noise and flames and sparks and bombs going off.

kids with the sparklers. i'm glad they dont give kids those little roman candles that spit out little fireworks every 2 seconds, i can see one of them tripping and shooting a roman candle right into my eye which would feel so good.


it's amazing to think that everywhere in china, which is huuuuuuuuuge if you didn't know, was setting off fireworks at the same time after midnight. everywhere you looked there were explosions. I bet it would look so amazing from a helicopter.

these are probably called firecrackers instead of fireworks right? they are the long strings of red firecrackers that you either hang up or lay on the ground and light up. The story is that you light firecrackers for the noise to scare away "Nian" this huge monster that terrorized some village in ancient china. When someone put bamboo in the fire it crackled and stuff and scared the monster away so every year now they use firecrackers to scare him away and other baddies too.

one of the smaller fireworks boxes. So for the rest of the week there has been random fireworks/crackers/bombs going off at all hours of the day and night. There are these bomb like ones that are one huge explosion that set off car alarms. those are a little hard to sleep through but you learn to sleep through the rest.