These last few days have been the chinese new year. From what I can gather, there's about as much emphasis (or at least tacky decoration) placed on the new year as we place on Easter, Christmas, and our own new year put together. Everywhere you look there are little strips of red paper with phrases of joy written upside down on them. Red lanterns are hung everywhere a lantern could be hung. There are also many little ritualistic things that the chinese do for their new year: it is a time to pay off debts to people that you owe; a time buy lots of flowers; a time to clean your room. I'm not really sure I understand, but then again it's certainly not any more strange than our own new year's custom of making a resolution and breaking it two weeks later.

I rang in the new year and Shanghai this year, at the absolute nicest Holiday Inn I've ever stayed at. I took pictures of this place (a four star hotel), because no one would believe me. On our first night out some tavern we went to watered down our 1 liter glasses of beer, but after we screamed at them for a little while they gave a around of real beer for free. With two liters of beer in our tummies we ran out into the street, where people light fireworks off to scare away the devils who eat people around the new year. These people don't mess around like we do, with out little sparklers and snakes and roman candles. They only light off massive chains of crackers and the kinds of bottle rockets I would expect to see at a professional show. Only, instead of lighting them a safe distance from the viewers, these go off on side walks and islands in the middle of the street. Dangerous, perhaps, but absolutely awesome to watch. It beat December 31st and July 4th put together.

Most of the things I saw and did in Shanghai are beyond my capacity to describe in words. Blogspot is supposed to let you upload pictures, but I've been having some difficulty doing so. I'm going to work on that, and get a flickr account if that fails. I have loads of beautiful pictures that describe my time here much better than my mangled prose could ever dream of doing.