New Years

After Kenneth picked me up we took the train to our hotel/apartment. Since it was New Years, we went over to one of the other Microsoft people’s apartments and had dim sum(hot pot) for supper, which is, I think, what people traditionally have. Kenneth and I had vegetarian hot pot, which isn’t really hot pot, but that is ok. (Hot pot is pretty meat-centric, I think.) We boiled some broth, and dumped some stuff in and ate it, so we went through the motions, anyway. C and Y, the other two Microsoft people, had real hot pot, with meat flavored broth and dough wrapped balls of things- fish balls, shrimp balls, chicken balls, beef balls, and then also chunks of meat. We all put some fun little rice patty things into the pot to cook too; they were about the size of a quarter and about an eighth of an inch thick, and were chewy but really good. We also had these weird translucent noodles. Well, we tried to eat the noodles. Since they were translucent, they were sort of hard to find in the broth. Also they were really slippery. So we didn’t actually end up eating many of them.

After supper we watched some of the New Years specials on tv. I slept through most of the tv-watching because I was pretty jet lagged, but from what I saw there were lots of silly skits and “Hello and Happy New Year from Mrs. Li’s fourth grade class in Jiangxi Province” and that sort of thing. No acrobats, which was lame. Looked terrible, I was glad I couldn’t understand most of it. Dreadful to have to be in the audience I expect, and to have to smile happily and wave whenever the cameras panned over you. But I guess if that is your sort of thing, it would have been ok. Looked horrible to me though, sitting there with a huge smile on your face trying to enjoy artificial good will, laughing at lame skits, staring bright eyed at has-beens up on stage singing and joking with the guests.

Of course, I might have been a little grumpy, what with the jet lag and all.

We heard intermittent fireworks all night. AAAALLLLLL Night. People are allowed to set off fireworks here. Kenneth and Y had bought some fireworks the day before, so around ten we went out to set off our own fire works. K and Y hadn’t been sure what to buy, so most of the stuff we had was fairly small, but that didn’t really matter. It was still really fun to set them off. We don’t get to blow things up in the US. I suppose that is probably for the best, but it is awesome- setting off fire crackers.

With one type of firework, we didn’t know to hold the tube with the explosives in it straight up. So we lit it, holding it kind of diagonally/horizontal. There were police officers hanging out all night in the public spaces, just sort of making sure that nothing went too wrong, keeping an eye on things, but pretty much letting people do what they wanted. However, when the police officers saw what we were doing, they ran over to us, as a group, screaming. . . something. I don’t speak Mandarin, so I couldn’t tell. But when the fireworks starting coming out of the tube straight at a parked van, we figured it out, and immediately pointed the explosives up towards the sky. Then we knew what the proper etiquette was for setting off fireworks. Learn by doing, I guess.