春节, 新年快乐!

When I first came to China (5 months ago), Julie and Mu took me to a restaurant (东北一家人) in downtown Wenzhou that had traditional food from their home region of China. For the Mid-Autumn Festival I visited an adjacent, similar restaurant (东北一家亲) with my hosts, as well as Jada and Ben, and I've wanted to go back for months.

These last few days I've eaten at both places and I actually got a little tired of it - such rich and delicious food loses its magic if you eat it three days in a row.


Besides food there have been other celebratory events. In the evening on 1/25/09 there were fireworks going off all over Wenzhou. Below is a video I took of the cityscape from Julie's balcony.



The amount of fire-power you're allowed to make use of is really astonishing:
After having dinner in the restaurant one night we stepped out and got to the opposite sidewalk in time to watch a group of kids light off a 5-meter chain of firecrackers in front of the restaurant. Small pieces of exploded material were hitting my jacket from more than 7 meters across the road, and the noise was deafeningly loud!

In our district there were boxes that each had more than 30 rocket fireworks going off, turning the apartment complex into a frightening bonanza of lights and explosions.
From the apartment of one of Julie's friends, where we were spending the last hours of the previous year and the first hours of the new year, the explosions were taking place at eye level not 15 meters from the window!


At night we watched a grand set of performances on TV that were bright, colorful, funny, and (for me at least) very, very confusing. Though I did get to see Jackie Chan sing, and for the first time I saw "Dashan", the Canadian TV personality who speaks immaculate Chinese and serves as the gold standard of all other foreigners in China.
(I'm not kidding, if you're a foreigner people will ask you if you know him).


Obeying tradition we made dumplings and ate them as part of a midnight meal. We also threw in leftovers from the many restaurant feasts. It's common practice to put some special somethings into just a few of the New Year dumplings before cooking them, so we can see what we will find in the New Year.

Here's a breakdown:
Coin = prosperity
Candy = sweetheart
Peanut = luck
(There was only one dumpling that had a coin, and only one with a candy, but several with peanuts).

I had to go through a lot of dumplings but at last I found one with something special (besides the delicious filling), it was the "sweetheart" dumpling. So it seems like I'm destined to find my sweetheart in the coming lunar year.
SWEET!