Happy Year of the Hare!

A week-long ferocious celebration of the Chinese new year has finally ended. We spent the new years eve celebration at a small lake in the city. Around midnight, there were the requisite fireworks (they say it is to scare off evil spirits, I suspect its partially due to the fun factor as well), but these were better than any I have ever seen before. Instead of having one group of people set off fireworks, the whole lake was surrounded by individuals setting off their own private stash of fireworks, so it was probably more than an hour's worth of avid fireworking around the entire lake. It was beautiful.

After 24 hours though, the non-stop fireworks had gotten a little wearing - and that was just the beginning. They finally stopped a week later (yesterday), and a shell-shocked me was very grateful.

During the week, there were several "temple festivals" around the city, and these pictures are from the one we went to.

It appears to be ice skating, but on chairs. We didn't attempt.
Some performers.
A wide variety of meat on a stick.
Writing with water (a song about teeth brushing, we were told)
Some people from China's paramilitary that were roaming around the festival, trying to herd people out at closing time. Apparently they are responsible for some not so nice business, which seemed to clash for some reason with the one guy carrying the stuffed bunny and the briefcase.
We got a coconut.
Other news:

-Today I start my night teaching class. They just called to inform me that I will have to teach until 9:30 instead of 9p, so these students may end up with a class on The Western Art of Napping.

- I have two interviews tomorrow for other teaching jobs, lets see if anything more suitable shakes out.

- A nice young Irish lad moved into our spare room. His second person singular usage results in referring to me as "ye," which makes me feel kind of regal. I like it.