Countdown to Chinese New Year

 The big Christmas tree in the loby of our apartment building has now changed to a

Spring Festival tree (Chinese New Year)

The hanging, lit, lanterns spin and orange trees are abound!



Beijing is now full of hustle and bustle as the Chinese prepare for their biggest holiday of the year!  Chun Jie  (Spring Festival or Chinese New Year) Traffic is even MORE terrible because families are out buying small gifts for their families and getting the neccessary ingredients for traditional meals they will share together.  I guess there will be a mass exodus at the end of this week as people travel to their hometowns, by plane, but mainly by train and bus.  The train ticket lines have been really long. 

 I am so excited to share with all of you the traditions we are about ready to be witness to.  We have been invited over to my friend Ada's house for the Chinese New Year Eve celebration with her extended family.  Supposedly, we will go over to her grandmother's house, watch the family play majiang (a difficult, favorite board game), watch a CCTV broadcast of festivities, stay up till midnight when we will eat dumplings.  I guess some of the dumplings will have coins in them and if you are lucky to find one, you will have good fortune for the upcoming year. 

Saturday, we visited Ada's home for the first time.  I sat by Ada on the airplane on the way to Hong Kong a while back.  We have been meeting each other for a few months for lunch and dinner. She lives with her parents and grandmother.  When we arrived, they put me to work helping to make dumplings with her mom and grandmother.  Ada told them I know how to make them, but I was surprised when I was asked to show my skills, or lack there of.  I got a little nervous being put on the spot.  We probably made 100 dumplings, I couldn't believe it.  Ada was teasing me, pointing to mine and saying, "That one's Tracy's, and that one's Tracy's."  She could tell that mine were not up to par.  :)  This event was a great opportunity to practice my Chinese.  No one in her family could speak English (her father knows a few words), so I studied because I reallly wanted to share with them as much as I could myself without Ada translating. 

 This is her father, Qu.

This is her Lao Lao (Grandmother) and her mother, An.

We took Ada's family some of our favorite western foods in a basket as a gift.  Hopefully they will have fun trying them out and seeing what they think.  They gave us a bunch of decorations for Chinese New Year.  I have put some of them up around our apartment.

They gave many more similar decorations, but I decided to take a more subtle approach.  :)