Chinese New Year

Oh I may never look at 4th of July the same. We can buy professional grade fireworks at the firework stands and shoot them off on our street. I think that the neighbors who stayed for Chinese New Year have their garages packed with explosives right now. Most Expats choose to leave and go on vacation outside of China because of the noise, traffic and the fact that for 3 days the city practically shuts down. Here are pictures from Chinese New Year's eve. We had a family dinner of "Pea Pie". For those of you who don't know that is my kids name for pork chops, mashed potatoes and peas. They then mix them together and call it pea pie. They have not seen pea pie since we left the states but I was able to assemble all the ingredients once our sea shipment arrived. So in Chinese tradition of a big family meal, that is what we had. We then went outside to see our neighbors shoot some fire works and they were amazing. We were invited down to have dumplings a midnight with some neighbors (that is a chinese tradtion) but the girls fell asleep. Mark went to represent the family and I thought I was going to turn in. Then midnight came and I was shocked out of bed by all the noise. It sounded like the biggest baddest thunderstorm you could think of. So I ran out to witness the site and every bit of the sky line was filled with fireworks. They do this to ward off the evil spirits from the year before so they don't follow into the new year. The next night we went to a banquet hall that can seat about 1000 people. We expected to it to be full because many chinese take their whole family out for dinner during this time but the place was empty except for us and another party. So we had the whole restaurant to ourselves. The kids ran, listened to music and danced on the stage. We took a tour of the kitchen and watched our food getting prepared. They would not let us take pictures. One guy did and they asked him to go sit down. But it was surprisingly clean. The woks were huge and they had fish tanks with every sea critter imagineable. So it was really a neat experience. And that is what we have done so far during Chinese New Year.