Last night was my sixth time welcoming in a new lunar year here in China. I always approach Chinese New Year’s Eve with a healthy dose of cynical expatations, and I’m always blown away, pun intended, with how it never fails to impress me.

True, the day(s) leading up to CNYE have every ratta-tat-tat sound sending a splash of rage through my spine for its relentless assault on holiday peace and quiet, but when the big event arrives and the entire country ignites into a cacophony of explosive sounds and visuals, it’s hard not to appreciate how truly one-of-a-kind the experience is.

It’s what I imagine people who live in Rio feel during Carnival, or Thai’s during Songkran. At its least, CNYE is annoying and at its worst down right dangerous — but it is, without a doubt, truly awesome.

Canadians are no strangers to fireworks; with decent, if conservative, showings twice a year. But it’s just not the same. No holiday in Canada is. I’m sure the same could be said for most other expat home countries.

Last night was our second time celebrating the new year in Suzhou’s expat ghetto, SIP. The laowai-saturated development zone tends to empty out over the holidays as the foreigners head for beaches and the affluent Chinese pack up the Porsche SUVs and visit their home towns. Last year’s CNYE was hit with a heavy snow, which left things a little bit quiet. Since then we’ve moved into an apartment on the 22nd floor, and I was hoping that similar weather wouldn’t ruin my chances of checking out fireworks at eye-level. I was not disappointed.

With many of our friends out of town, and Casey still too small to really appreciate the chaos and danger of cheap Chinese fireworks, we kept things low-key. Our friends Steven and Angel came over and we picked up some pre-arranged take-out from an excellent local Sichuan place (we had to book the take-out 4 days in advance as demand for the place is so high).

After dinner and some drinks we all headed down to Jinji Hu (“Golden Rooster Lake”) which is a couple blocks away. I had heard that the SIP corporation was launching fireworks from the small island in the centre of the lake and following it with their Spring Festival fountain show. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, but was thoroughly impressed.

The 45 minute show featured a decent collection of fireworks a calibre above the typical family-launched stuff, and the fountain choreography was impressive. What I liked most was that I finally had a chance to use my DSLR to shoot some fireworks. There’s nothing uncommon about fireworks in China, but the very thing that makes the whole event so great, also usually makes it terrible to try and shoot — it’s complete pandemonium. The event at the lake gave me a specific spot of sky I could aim at and plenty of time to play with shutter speeds and apertures — I’m pretty slow when it comes to shooting, so extra time is key for me taking anything that’s not a blurry mess of poor crops.

Here are the results:

Fireworks @ Lakeside Park – SIP, Suzhou

Fireworks In Our Community

Maggie, Casey, Angel and Steven

Heading down to the lake Casey didn’t seem too impressed with all the noise, but only a few minutes after arriving he fell asleep and remained so for the whole event (as shown in the above picture).

After things wrapped up at the lake we headed back home and watched the annual CCTV Gala. Well, Angel and Maggie watched it, Steven and I spent most of the time poking fun at it with the rest of the China Tweeple.

As the countdown began, I headed out onto our front balcony to take in the sulphuric spectacular. If you watch about a minute into the video below, you’ll see the camera nearly fall out of my hands as the air right beside me filled with fireworks lit from down below. Nearly peed my pants — great way to start the new year.

All-in-all, it was a great time with great food and great friends. Now in the acrid afterglow, I’ll resume my dour outlook for next year’s bedlamic blast.

A couple cups of strong coffee and I’ve recovered from my 5th Chinese New Year‘s Eve in China. Despite living in Suzhou-Singapore Industrial Park (SIP) last year as well, this was the first time we celebrated the holiday in this district. Normally I would just hit Shiquan Jie (Suzhou’s bar street) for the big event, as its location in the downtown core puts it smack dab in the middle of all the action.

Because of our pregnancy, and a newborn in our tribe, we decided to keep things close to home this year and just had friends over for dinner and more friends over for drinks.

SIP, or as it’s come to be called in our little group, “China Lite”, is unique in that the majority of the residents are not locals. Many of those that live here are Westerners, North East Asians, HKers or Taiwanese. What’s more, a solid amount of the Chinese contingent are out-of-towners who simply work in wealthy Suzhou. What this means for holidays is that SIP becomes a bit of a ghost town as many head home for the holidays (or SE Asia, if you’re a laowai).

There are a lot of things that make life in SIP much, much better than many of the places I’ve lived in China, but the lack of an explosion-filled buildup for midnight is not one of them. We hedged our bets on something exciting happening down at Jinji Hu, the lake a block or two away from us, but didn’t find much after getting there. There were a few impressive displays in the distance and the night wasn’t exactly void of fireworks, but when I look back on previous years, this was definitely the tamest.

Fortunately we had what was important; friends, family, food and rum!

The other thing that might have dampened festivities was that Suzhou was hit with a relatively massive amount of icy snow last night. Walking back from the lake it was surreal seeing all the cars covered in white. Suzhou rarely gets snow, and usually the few flakes you might see fluttering through the air have disappeared before hitting the ground. But here are some pics of what I woke up to this morning:

The snow is reminiscent of January two years ago when snow virtual shut down the city.

Our dog Button hardly knows what to do with the stuff, timidly stepping on the now-crunchy and white grass to do her morning business. I’m hopeful that it might get a bit colder and give us some nice fluffy stuff so she can run and play in it, but more than likely it will just stay this icy, slushy sleet and/or melt away.

But that’s all the more reason for me to curl up in my cozy apartment and just relax on this holiday Sunday. All the best to you and yours in the year of the tiger. 春节快乐.

NOTE: Just after writing this I looked outside and large fluffy flakes are coming down — there’s hope yet for a (non-hospital-needed) snowball fight in Suzhou!

Most, the rich and clever ones at least, leave the country. Getting the frack out well before the world’s largest human migration takes place and starts blowing shit up is ideal, but simply not practical for everyone – particularly those of us who have spouses that get all warm and fuzzy around the holiday.

Chinese New Year is, for all intents and purposes, the Christmas of the East. Warm familial gathers, gifts, crowded malls, last-minute shopping, celebration of myths, and food – lots and lots of food.

The biggest difference is the god damn fireworks. Y’know how annoying it is to walk into a store on the 26th of December for some afternoon shopping and hear Jingle Bells for a ninety billionth time? Well, it’s just like that – but instead of a shop it’s your home, instead of the afternoon it’s somewhere between 12am and 6am and instead of the muzakiriffic carol it is explosions that put the Bombing of Baghdad to shame.

This being the fifth Spring Festival I’ve endured celebrated, I had hoped that the whole thing wouldn’t phase me. My lack of sleep and frayed nerves are evidence that I was wrong.

Chinese New Year’s Eve this past Sunday night was, however, quite excellent. Our friends Mark and Lyndal came over and Maggie cooked us up a feast of Chinese food. After dinner some more friends joined us and we had a few drinks before we headed downtown to buy explosives of questionable quality and drink some more – an activity that anywhere else would be illegal for its rather obvious conflict with public safety.

We hit up the Shamrock, as it’s been ages since I’ve been downtown, and I tend to gravitate towards places familiar. Last year I also celebrated CNY eve at the Shamrock, and it was strikingly quieter this year – people-wise at least. I’m not sure if its the tighter economic situation or the winds of favour have shifted a bit since I used to be a regular down there.

After midnight, and the cacophony of fireworks, we lit some sparklers that were quickly scooped up by the little beggar kids who would swing them around and shout out “gei wo money, gei wo money”.

A quick video, playing with YouTube’s annotations, showing the Zero Hour

Today is, allegedly (as I’ve not found any solid references to it online), “Second Chinese New Year”. Second Chinese New Year falls five days after the First Chinese New Year, which itself happens a week after “Small Chinese New Year”, and 10 days before the Lantern Festival. I think someone needs to enter a 12-step program for EA – exploders anonymous – “Hi, I’m China and I like to blow shit up.”

Some photos

Here are a few photos from Chinese New Year’s Eve down on Shiquan Jie outside the Shamrock:

We should be celebrating tonight with some newcommers to China, and that’s always fun. Maggie’s got pots a bubblin’, cooking up some good dongbei food and we’ll be heading downtown to get drunk and blow shit up a bit later on. Fingers-crossed that tomorrow I still have fingers to cross.

A very happy 牛 year to all!

And as I always like to leave a year with a laugh:

PLUS! Super duper bonus link:
I’m fortunate to have some high-quality commenters on this blog, but for anyone that’s ever had a blog, digg’d a story, or uploaded a video on YouTube – you need to read: The 8 Most Obnoxious Internet Commenters

春节快乐！

China Telecom, the only ISP in Suzhou that I know of, not only provides me with a connection that is about as slow and inconsistent as I am, and staffs their “technical” “service” department with dorks that have less education than my stairwell sweeper, but now, now they’re infecting that retardedly slow and censored connection with fucking ads!

Somewhat randomly as I’ve been browsing over the last couple days I’ve had the site I was attempting to get to be halted and was then confronted with five seconds of these (click for bigger versions):

Ugh.

What’s even more worrisome is that this insertion method between random Web page visits blatantly says “Guess what, we’ve got the technology to know where you’re going and what you’re looking at.”