Xian Nian Kuai Le!

Xin Nian Kuai Le! Happy Chinese New Year!!! Hopefully this year shows prosperous for the Chinese and the beginning of fun for me! The New Year began on the 14th, so on the 13thwe celebrated until midnight just like any New Years’ party does!
Our New Years Eve was spent in Luzhi, a water town outside of Suzhou. We wandered about the streets for a couple of hours, pausing for pictures with the Chinese who just found us to interesting…? This felt like ‘old’ China, like what I imagined…not the modern world of Shanghai and Suzhou, some of the top manufacturing cities in the world! Not that there’s anything wrong with Suzhou, it was just different that what I thought of China to be. Anyways, so we walked around meats racks, crowded streets, firework stands, and over canals for a bit of sightseeing and in search of fireworks. While walking on the street I found several things to be quite funny.
The first, was I saw these chicken on the ground squawking and pecking around.

Animals on the streets really aren’t uncommon, but what I saw next was just funny. Across the street, and I mean directly, like maybe 10 feet away was a food stand. And they were selling… cooked CHICKEN!!!! If I’m not mistaken, which I know I’m not, they were actually killing and cooking the chickens right there in the street. Talk about fresh meat!!!

The second thing that was humorous was when we were trying to buy fireworks. The lady got out a REAL LIVE abacus!!! It was HILLL-ARY-OUS!!! She was like doing the little numbers and then she showed the abacus to my Uncle (but I don’t think it meant anything to him, because I’m not sure if he can even READ an abacus) and then argued about how much the fireworks were worth.

It was funny to think that people still used this ancient way of math in the streets of China! We didn’t end up buying the fireworks, but instead went across the street for a better deal. HUGE fireworks for the grand total of… $20. Yup, and they probably over charged us because they knew they could rip off ‘Westerners’.
We then headed home and had a party at our house with 3 other families: One family from Michigan and two families from the French speaking part of Canada. It was fun to try to communicate with the new family from Quebec, because their children didn’t speak English! We played Apples to Apples and after it got dark went out to the park on Duchsu lake to blow up fireworks!
The Chinese were the ones who invented fireworks and believed that the bright lights and loud noises scared off the evil spirits that would haunt the New Year. So in other words, people get really into fireworks over here, more so than my cousins on the 4th of July, and let’s talk about crazy :P EVERYONE lights up their sparklers and fireworks, poppers and roman candles. Across the lake we saw hundreds of fireworks explode. It was very beautiful. Soon it was too cold to stand out by the lake so we went home.
On Tuesday we went into Shanghai for 2 nights! It was really cool to walk around town during the New Years’ celebration and see all the decorations and fun that the people were having. The second night that we were in Shanghai I couldn’t go to sleep because I kept hearing really loud bang and huge flashes outside of our window. It wasn’t that I was scared of the fireworks or anything…, ohkay I was a little nervous, because they sounded awfully close to the hotel (we were on the 17th floor) and car alarms were going off and it was just so loud!!! So I jumped out of bed after an hour of not being able to sleep and step out into the living room area and look out the window. I look out only to see that RIGHT BELOW US some people are blowing up monstrous-big fireworks only 500 ft from our hotel!!! That explains the car alarms all right! You could feel the vibration of the fireworks exploding in the air and the bits of cardboard were definitely hitting someone’s window. Fireworks were all over the city, in the middle of the city with signs that say ‘no fireworks’, but the police didn’t care. The police were probably admiring the bright lights and wondering if they should get their sparklers out of their trunk. Anyways the fireworks lit up Shanghai’s night sky like no night I had ever seen, not that I’ve been in Shanghai at night before, but it was a sight to behold! After a while the man blowing fireworks next to our hotel stopped and I was able to go to sleep.
I wondered why they were blowing up fireworks five days AFTER New Years’ Day? After some ‘research’ (okay, I just typed it in on Google and pressed ‘I’m feeling lucky’, but research sounds smart) I found that the 5th day after Chinese New Year locals will shoot off firecrackers, in the attempt to get Guan Yu's attention, thus ensuring his favor and good fortune for the New Year. Guan Yu is a famous general who served in one of China’s civil wars and is worshipped and respected as the epitome of loyalty and righteousness (yeah I found that with ‘research’ too :P). The 15th day after Chinese New Year, marking the end of Chinese New Year, is called ‘Lantern Festival’. Candles are lit outside houses as a way to guide wayward spirits home and families walk the street carrying lighted lanterns.
Another tradition is the giving of Red packets and they almost always contain money, usually varying from a couple of dollars to several hundred. Custom, the amount of money in the red packets should be of even numbers, as odd numbers are associated with cash given during funerals. The number 8 is considered lucky, so if you have a cash amount with a number eight in it is ‘lucky money’. Aunt Pam and Uncle Mark gave me 108 RMBs in a red envelope. That’s about $15 USA money.
Chinese New Year or Spring Festival is the most important holiday for the Chinese and one of the most fun times for Western’s to visit China. I’m so glad that I have gotten to experience it! But it’s not over yet! I still have ten more days to celebrate!