Warzone or Chinese New Year?

Happy 牛 Year!

The character means cow and is pronounced sort of like "new." Also, it means cow (and its the year of the cow) and in slang 牛 means "cool."  牛, eh?

Anyway, upon arriving home in Shanghai, I walked into a room full of my Chinese relatives and food and tea and noisy kids. Nelly.  And then we went to dinner and ate a lot of food, gave and received red envelopes, and so on (which is a phrase that my host brother loves to use.  "Megan, lets play rock paper scissors and Chinese chess and so on!")

But really, Chinese New Year consists of the following:

Eating, eating, eating

Massive family gatherings

Feast, feast, feast

Gan bei, gan bei, gan bei

Movie, movie, movie

Not sleeping, not sleeping, not sleeping EVER

One of the core defining things in ancient Chinese culture is gunpowder, thus fireworks.  And firecrackers.  Or really anything that is flammable and makes noise.  Evidently, this will help them be prosperous in the New Year.  Really, its just obnoxious.  I live in the middle of downtown and they were lighting them off just outside my building. (as well as out the window from the inside)  They also shoot them off of cars until all the alarms are going off and all the windows shatter.  Almost 24 hours straight, everyday, non stop.  The worst part is that from my window, I cannot even see the fireworks, but oh, can I hear the firecrackers.  Bing bang boom! Duck and cover!  My host mom gave me a towel to wrap around my head.

Yesterday, luckily, was the final day of Chinese New Year.  The fifteen day, the lantern festival.  Two days ago, my family and I went to old Shanghai for shopping and to look at the lanterns.  They are beautiful.  In they center of old town there is a huge square with a small river and a massive bull sculpture as well as lanterns with riddles written on them.  Each riddle may or may not describe a Bull (for this year, last year it would be a rat).  I might have appreciated it more, had I been able to understand the riddles, or perhaps it was my ignorance that made this riddles particularly curious. 

The older of my host brothers and I  are starting to hang out a lot and I love it.  My Chinese is good enough so we can chat, sort of.  He tells me funny stories about his friend, like how they make fun of some people in class, or that someone told him what the middle finger means in America, typical ten year old boy stuff.  We also kid around making fun of eachother: "Megan, you are a pig!" "Okay, fine, I am a pig, but only when pigs fly, so I am a flying pig!"  (We exchange teaching eachother idioms in our respective tongues.) Right now he is in my room half doing homework, half playing Chinese chess with me while I blog.  And he might have me in check....