Family: Many people travel back the "home land" during this time. They either go the village or town that their parents live in or that their parents came from. For us, this meant that our city of about 14 million people empties out! Nearly half of the residents leave for the new year. It is a ghost town. Streets normally shoulder to shoulder full of people, are completely empty. Weird!
Food: With so many people traveling, it is no surprise that being off work is a normal expectation. Our favorite restaurant is closed for a whole month! Our favorite grocery store is closed for two weeks. The post office is also closed for two weeks. Our house helper usually makes us lunch while we are studying language. She is off for a week. And seriously missed haha. We usually eat dinner at a little local restaurant like the ones in the picture above. We eat out because our family loves local chinese food! We really enjoy spending the time out and about among the locals. And eating out is much cheaper for our family than cooking American food. But clearly, during chinese new year, local food is not an option. This is where our Y2K preparation came in handy :). We needed to stock pile food and supplies for the time the stores are closed.
Fireworks: Fireworks is probably the one word that can sum up Chinese New Year. They love their fireworks! They have no restriction on where or what or when they can be set off. The first big ones to go off by our apartment happened at 2 am serval nights before the new year. It was totally unexpected. I literally jumped out of bed. Heart racing. The next several nights were lots and lots of fireworks at all hours of the night. We didn't get much sleep. New Years Eve is the big kahuna night for fireworks though. It sounded like we lived in a war zone. The bangs and flashes of light from our window were literally non-stop until about 4 am. Bella and I had been up so much the nights leading up to new years eve that fireworks or not, we were passed out. Daddy couldn't sleep though, and not being able to hear the TV through the bangs and booms, got lots of reading in that night. We hear that the fireworks will continue through the next week. They are becoming white noise though, no big deal.
1 comment:
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