Chinese New Year's Eve

Today is the first day of the year on the Chinese Lunar Calendar!

Happy Year of the Tiger!

New Year's Eve is very exciting here...mostly due to the unbelievable amount and size of fireworks that people set off in the neighborhoods. I'm talking about stuff that shoots up to the 15th floor or higher being set off less than 10 meters from the building.

Chinese New Year or Spring Festival is the biggest holiday of the year. Everyone gets at least one week off of work and returns to be with their families for the holidays. Yesterday (New Year's Eve) most of the shops around here were already closed. Even most restaurants close around here for this holiday!

So we went outside before dinner with a couple other expat (non-chinese) friends who had stuck around during this holiday and lit some sparklers. Here are the girls enjoying their sparklers. It was cold, but not wet yet (began raining and snowing early this morning) so very enjoyable. Alex picked up a couple of fountain type fireworks as well that the girls enjoyed!

Geneva staying safe in the sling :). She didn't really care much about the sparklers.

Vera did great! I was a little concerned about how she would do, but she was really careful and had a great time!

As soon as it got dark, the real show began and there were fireworks pretty much all night. This morning around 5am things started up again with the long strings of noisy fireworks bringing in the first day of the new year. We tried to take some photos, but pictures of fireworks just don't turn out very well on our little camera. I did take a couple photos this morning out our window of the fireworks trash left out...all the red paper in the first photo is from the strings of red firecrackers and the second photo is of a box that held the kind of fireworks that shoot up really high. The girls liked watching those the best!