The Year of the Rabbit

So what is all the fuss about fireworks? You cannot even imagine until you have experienced them yourself! And we were told that because the year of the Rabbit is not as “Cool” as other years, that this was a “mild” year as far as the fireworks were concerned.

Fireworks in the morning, fireworks at night… Chinese New Year officially began on February 3, 2011. We let our driver go home early that day to celebrate with his family. We stayed home and ate Gyoza (dumplings) which is a typical Chinese New Years dinner. We heard fireworks all night but around 9 pm they started getting intense! We went for a walk around our community; they were shooting them off in every direction. The air was thick with smoke from all the fireworks and it sounded like we were in a war zone. On the street corners people were burning piles of paper money (Mao bucks funny money). They believe that by doing this they can send riches to deceased family and friends. The Chinese believe that the spirits continue to live in the dead as they did in the living. They can burn paper watches, clothes, cars, credit cards and even kitchen appliances! The idea is that if they burn money on the street corners there are more channels for the money to travel. I guess if you can't take it with you when you go, your relatives can send it to you!






You could not appreciate the level of noise unless you heard it yourself. I called my family at home and could hardly talk or hear over the noise inside of our house! The windows were shaking and the wood banister on our stairs was shaking. The fireworks started around 9 and reached a crescendo around midnight. By 1:30 am we were able to get to sleep.

At this point most of the town had closed down, many of the shops and restaurants were closed. Most Chinese people return “home” for Chinese New Year and many do not return. We gave our Ayi a week off and our driver wanted to work because he makes a whopping $3.57 usd per hour Holiday pay! He was worried that we would not have anything to eat while she was off… Rick suggested that he probably thinks we have an Ayi to cook for us in the States as if I could not possibly prepare a meal for my family!

Our driver and his wife invited us to spend day 3 of Chinese New Year with them in their home! We have been told that this is a great honor. Mr Li and his wife spent 2 hours in the kitchen preparing 7 different Chinese dishes for us! We had fish, which is always served at Chinese New Year because it is considered “lucky”, squid, vegetables, pork, and a variety of other dishes! We learned that Mr Li is a really good cook, and when it was all said and done he cleaned up the kitchen while his wife entertained Lauren.

We celebrated day 4 by going out to dinner with friends…30 of us! We then watched fireworks over Xinghai square. You have not really seen fireworks until you have seen them in China! This show rivaled any fireworks show that we have ever seen…anywhere!

Rick and I ventured out around downtown Dalian and took some photos to share with you all the effort that is put into decorating for Chinese New Year. We also went to one of the big parks in Dalian which had a lantern festival. The park was decorated with lanterns and many light up displays. The best part was the traditional Chinese music played by drummers at the entrance to the park.









They even had light up cactus!



The Chinese people are always posing for photos… so we decided to do the same!

The Chinese New Year ended on February 17th. We celebrated with friends at the Lantern Festival. We had a buffet dinner with friends and celebrated with… you guessed it MORE FIREWORKS! So rumor has it a group of people pooled some money together to put on this show. They raised approximately $5000 usd, well there were so many fireworks we ended up leaving before the show could finish!

What we learned about Chinese New Year. It is steeped in age old traditions. We were given decorations for our home, ate traditional Gyoza and definitely had our fill of fireworks for the year!