Happy Chinese New Year!

Happy Chinese New Year! Yesterday was the Chinese New Year, and it was amazing. This is the year of the ox. If anyone is having a baby this year, you can expect your little one to be tough and able to handle pressure. If you don't want a crybaby, this is the year for you to have some children.

Unfortunately, they will be stubborn, narrow-minded, and have no public relations skills. 

On Saturday, we went to see the usual tourist places.... the bund, the pearl tower, the people's square. Then, after we watched the sunset over the magnificent skyline, we had a drink atop the Jin Mao tower and got to see the skyline from a bird's eye view. It used to be the tallest building in Shanghai, but it has now been surpassed by the SWFC, which will probably be trumped next year by some other. The city is actually sinking because they're building so many skyscrapers. 

For New Year's Eve, we managed to reserve a table through connections in Hong Kong at club M1NT to watch the fireworks. The club is on the top storey of a building that has a panoramic view of the entire city, and a perfect view of the river and the pudong district. The scene was like nothing you've ever seen in the U.S. The ENTIRE city was lit up with fireworks for the whole of an hour. Fireworks are legal in Shanghai for the new year, so every kid in town was shooting them off at midnight. It was actually much better than any orchestrated one I've ever seen.  

For the first day of the new year, we slept all day because EVERYTHING  was closed. at 8:00 PM, we woke up and went for a hot pot meal, and got kicked out at 10:00 when they closed and our bellies were awfully distended. Of course, we had to have our share of the firework fun as well, so we stocked up on an arsenal of fireworks for $10 and blew them off in our hotel room, which caused a formidably sized fire, but most of the room was still intact after the sprinklers finally managed to put it out. We're still disputing the damage liabilities with the hotel, but they shouldn't be more than a few thousand dollars. 

....Just kidding! We just caused some mayhem for the amusement of a couple old chinese men in the street outside of our hotel. 

All in all, Chinese New Year was a great experience, and a great chance to really practice mandarin, because so few people speak even basic english. Now I am in Beijing, and even fewer people speak english here. Tomorrow we are going to see the Wall, the City, and the Square...