First and foremost, Hoppy Belated Chinese New Years everyone.  Its the year of the Rabbit.  Last year was year of the tiger, if you didn’t know.  So for all of those who were born on the year 2000 or the year 1988, it’s your lucky year! 

Every year from late January until mid February  occurs the Chinese Spring Festival called Chunjie (lit. Spring Holiday).  It’s basically Chinese New Years sandwiched between two weeks of total economic and industrial halt.  The beginning of the Chunjie is marked with some stores closing.  From there, little by little stores, restaurants, stands, supermarkets, and retailers succumb mysteriously as both vendors and buyers disappear from the streets.  The height of this happens during Chinese New Years Eve itself.  Basically, zero stores are open.  None at all.  Well, maybe except Wal-mart or stores of that kind.  Everyone has gone home for the holidays to spend time with their families.  Then after New Years day, stores start opening again and China steps out of hibernation into full industrial light-speed.  Oh, and it’s a transportational nightmare during this time.  Actually, that’s not true, because most days and especially during rush hour it’s a transportational nightmare.  But even more so during Chunjie.  Imagine one billion people trying to go home in the same 1 week time span, half of those who are migrant workers.  And then imagine them trying to go back to their work places thereafter.  Its crazy, I say.

Lucky for me, I could avoid all that by spending my New Years with Jarlene’s family.  Jarlene is an old friend from college who now teaches in China.  Her family resides in Beijing and she kindly invited me over to spend time with them.  It started out with lounging around watching CCTV’s New Years special while snacking on chocolates and fruits.  Then we moved on to a nice family dinner with lots of homemade Chinese dishes.

The highlight of the night was definitely the jiaozi making.  Jiaozi is Chinese for dumplings.  Around 11:00 pm we started making jiaozi.  Mine were pretty bad, they just looked like raviolis.  They were boiled for several minutes and soon there were mountains of jiaozis, cascades of jiaozis, forests of jiaozis, jiaozis far as the eye can see (and as the stomach can contain!).  Intermittently throughout the night fireworks would go off every once in a while, accompanied by oohs and ahhs as I furiously tried to take pictures/videos.  Little did I know that when the clock stroke midnight, something spectacular would happen. 

What is the best way to describe this?  WW3 in the Beijing skies?  You know the MACY’s firework spectacular that every new years in the states?  It was as if every man woman and child in China was armed with one of those and released it simultaneously at midnight.  Sparklers, cracklers, spinners, flares, bloomers, ballistic missiles, you name it.  They had it all.  It was nuts I say, absolutely nuts.  Actually, at one point one of the larger autofire flares was knocked to the ground shooting missiles in all directions horizontally.  One of those went straight for the bushes, which caught immediately on fire.  Wasting no time, half a dozen Chinese men armed with fire extinguishers ran to the scene and made short work of the brushfire.  Amazing.  Shocking.  Exciting.   

Me and the family, toasting.  Ganbei!