I know I have often tried to describe the scene and sounds of celebrating 'spring festival' or Chinese New Year, but every year we experience it, words still fail the whole phenomenon. One American who has lived in China a while described it as: 'purgatory and Groundhog's day' hilarious and fairly accurate.
Let's try this...
Put on your favorite war movie...lots of bombs, shellings, lots of gunfights. Blare the movie as loud as your TV will go. Maybe put it on in your back room for a full week. As it gets closer to 'the day' go sit in that room for three days. Turn on the surround sound. When we say 'lots of fireworks' we do not mean the small town, beautiful, 4th of July variety, our next door neighbor had those. No no. We mean the packed- full-of-gunpowder- BOOM kind, times 500, or however many neighbors you have. At least this year they did not set them off in the stair well.
We had a very pleasant evening, enjoying our cook out, our walk, seeing all our neighbors also eating outside with their family and friends. We built a fire and roasted marshmallows and enjoyed smores. Yum. We lit off some of our own fireworks. Tobin was NOT having it. He actually did not mind all the loudness around us, but when David tried to do one Tobin would cry. But he eventually got okay with most of it.
We put Tobin and Gabrielle down around 7:30-8:00 p.m. and let the older two girls stay up until 9:00 p.m. and watch half of a movie with us. Then David and I watched a movie (still fireworks blaring behind us the whole time). A true-story war movie.
The girls really wanted us to wake them up for the midnight commotion. They were sleeping so well when the mayhem and loudness started, we almost did not wake them. Then we did and opened their curtains and watched beautiful fireworks all around us and heard all the others. We are always amazed that they sleep through the fireworks going on all evening and then wake up when they get really loud. This time we woke them. Then Tobin did wake up and David let him watch too. David laid down with him while I laid down with the girls. This is when Sophia, in all her tiredness said: 'actually, I don't really like Chun Jie (Spring Festival)'.
This year's festivities have been fun and enjoyable, despite the noise. We were invited to various friends' houses, and chose three villages to visit. Pics of those will follow soon.
