Chinese Lantern Festival

One of the other English teachers at my school and I decided to go exploring for the Chinese Lantern Festival tonight. It. Was. Insanity. Everyone in the city was out, literally every third person on the street was shooting off fireworks or firecrackers, streets were shut down, you could not find a cab if your life depended on it... it was amazing. I thought the air was bad before though, eek. It was also SOOOO cold ("I want to die" cold) and started snowing, which kind of killed the lanterns. I was expecting (hoping for) one large unleashing of the lanterns, "Tangled" style, but everyone was just releasing them at random from wherever. The festival did mean that all Chinese restaurants were closed too, so we ended up having to go to Pizza Hut for dinner, the most expensive and fanciest looking Pizza Hut ever I might add. We were stared at so much I felt like we were the beginning of a joke, "So, a white girl and an Indonesian girl walk into a Chinese Pizza Hut..."