Chinese New Year

Today marked the end of a very nice, two week vacation and the start of another work day. It was easy to tell that it was the first day back from work. Everyone was smiling and asking how their celebrations were, while trying hard to hide the tiredness and possible lack of motivation. In my case, I simply forgot to eat before I left for work, so I was trying hard to hide the fact I was starving. But with it being my short day today, I didn't have to wait long to get a nice, hot bowl of beef ramen. For cheap!

These two weeks were the Chinese New Year Celebrations. Those of you that have been paying attention to my youtube series as well as this blog know about my crazy-person rant about the fireworks. I won't get into that again. You never knew when they were going to light off, or how close you were going to be to them when someone lit them. If there was a chance of getting hurt, I'm sure you'd have been pushed away,  but for the most part, the people that saw you jump and scream were probably laughing at you. At least, that's what happened to me one night.

On sidewalks at different parts of the city, red wrappers still litter the streets from firecrackers and different explosives. Unlike America, China spends about two weeks blowing things up instead of that one day in July. Which was really cool. You never knew when you were going to get a nice firework show. My only complaint about it was that by saying you never know when the fireworks would happen, that could mean very early in the morning as well.

Then again, being up on the 30th floor allowed me to see fireworks in a whole new perspective. Instead of looking like they reached all the way to the stars, they looked like they were suspended in midair, like a magical explosion of glitter. It was like someone on the ground was shooting magic beams out of their hands or random weapons instead of shooting rockets in the sky.

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A couple notes about the next few posts.

1. For who knows how long, the posts will be about Chinese New Year, and probably the things I did.

2. Don't be surprised if a post that has nothing to do with Chinese New Year pops up in the mix.

3. Never trust USPS with international packages.

Tianjin photo of the day.

At the 798 Art District in Beijing. I'll talk about that adventure in a future post.