Chinese New Year 2009

Chinese New Year (often called Spring Festival here) was yesterday. The day before last I met up with my friend Kitty at a grocery store near where she lives and we bought a bunch of food to make a Spring Festival dinner. Actually, her plans changed so we ended up making lunch instead. We decided to make some dumplings, steamed shrimp, green beans, and kung pao chicken.


Kitty making some dough for the dumplings

I have made dumplings before, but never made the filling before. The filling was made up of ground pork, minced ginger, a dash of salt, a dash of pepper, and some vegetable that is like a spring onion, but not as strong.


Dumpling filling and dough

One of Kitty's roommates help with the cooking too.


Making some dumplings

We also had some strawberries and fruit juice.


Kitty posing with our lunch

After lunch I went home and took a nap. We had ate a lot. In the evening I went to the only place that I knew that was open... Shamrock Pub. There was a pretty good size crowd that night... mostly foreigners.


Graham (left) and Lian Yi (right) all dressed up

At one point in the evening we had a dumpling making contest.


Team 1 starts making some dumplings and a mess

I made dumplings earlier that day, so I got chosen to be a judge. The winning team won a bottle of red wine.


The winning dumpling makers

At midnight we went outside and shot off a bunch of fireworks and watched as most of ChengDu did also.


Crowd outside Shamrock Pub


A champagne toast


My friend Angela

Here's a very short video of the fireworks over downtown ChengDu...



At one point a little after midnight it started to snow. It wasn't long before it changed into rain though.

On New Years day I stayed home and relaxed. Played on the computer a little and read some of Flashman for Freedom.