Chinese New Year

Life has finally just about returned to normal in China after Chinese New Year/Spring Festival. Spring Festival is the biggest, most important holiday all year and interrupts almost all aspects of life here for about three weeks. I missed the whole thing last year, but I did catch Lantern Festival, which fell soon after.

This year, Spring Festival was quite soon after my family had come to visit me for a two week excursion around China and my SO had moved to Xiamen from The States. My SO and I decided to conserve funds and stick around town whilest everyone else was traveling for the holiday. It was really quiet around town, especially the area we live in, which was actually quite nice and relaxing, though it was pretty challenging to find food or entertainment outside of our home.

We really only did one authentic Chinese thing over the holiday. For the actual day itself, Chinese New Year, we joined a coworker at her family's home an hour outside of the city.

We sat around drinking baijo with the grandparents and parents (my SO's first and probably last experience with baijo, I think). We had a big family hot pot lunch where we were seriously force overfed. We went for a walk in "the country", which turned out to be a themed park with paddle boats, farming exhibits, a ropes course and other random treats. I stumbled upon and joined a grandpa, son and baby trio shooting off fireworks in (at?) "the country". And then we went home because we were exhausted.

Spring Festival didn't seem like as big of a deal here in part because everyone goes home to their families and few people are actually from Xiamen, and also in part because fireworks are illegal on the island. Lantern Festival actually happened without us even knowing until the night of because of this (which was SO disappointing). Ah well.