Chinese New Year - Fantastic and Crazy

We have had a blast and also been completely overwhelmed too in Shanghai during Chinese New Year - a crazy week of fireworks, crowds, and all round madness. Brilliant!

 Several days of fireworks - all over the city - it really seemed like a war zone and so unsafe - but tucked inside our apartment we had a fantastic view of the goings on - some fireworks were so close they hit our balcony !!!However, the fireworks go on for hours into the small hours, so not much sleep recently!- have to send the money god back to heaven with good wishes. Still more to come at the end of the 15 day festival ...

 New Years Day (Chinese New Year) is the time to go to the Long Hua Temple - it seemed like most of Shanghai's 25 million or so residents had decided to go there too - this is the crowd trying to get into the temple - it is The best time to ask the gods for fortune and good luck.

 Around the temple there was a party/festival atmosphere - animals, food stalls, all kinds of stuff for sale (some very strange and weird things) and many beggars

 Here is Evan with our friend Alice - the next day (day 2 of the 15 day celebration) we went to a Taoist Temple - here we found hundreds of different gods - in this picture they have found the group of gods representing the horse years (Evan is a horse in Chinese Astrology) - what we didn't realise is that there is a separate god for each horse year - Evan and Alice found his very own god! Of course, the masses had the same idea, so you had to push and shove a bit to get to your god and to tie a red ribbon for good luck and prayers (like we did with mom at the temple in Zhouzhang)

 Red and gold are the lucky colors in China (White is bad luck by the way - the color of death) (If you're very interested, 8 is very lucky, 4 is very unlucky...) As it is the Year of the Snake - everywhere are red and gold snakes - here is a picture of a typical market scene at the moment

 We also went to Yu Yuan - in the old part of Shanghai - very famous for its Lantern Festival - unbelievable crowds (and we're pretty used to crowds now, but this were something else!)

 However, by night-time it was so worth it - thousands of lanterns were lit and the effect was amazingly beautiful - when the lanterns were switched on, for a few moments the crowd was stunned into silence and we all just gazed around us - fantastic!

 Some of the lanterns are huge - here is a gold snake riding on a mythical animal (forgotten the name) - half tortoise and half dragon - this lantern 'sculpture' is huge - you can tell by looking at the little people in front of it.

A street scene at Yu Yuan - most beautiful.

Today was our last day of work for a while! Tomorrow we are heading out for a day trip to a city called Wuxi - on the old grand canal that linked the old cities around here with Beijing. More later!