Happy Lantern Festival!

Today was Lantern Festival Day! It's the last day of the Spring Festival celebration. People place lanterns outside of their homes and businesses, often with riddles written on them. People can try to figure out the riddles as they pass by. Today is also the last day people can legally set off fireworks.

Cindy's family invited me to have lunch with them to celebrate Lantern Festival and Cindy's grandmother's birthday. They thought I should end the festival with the people I began it with! We went to a restaurant and I got to meet a lot of the Sun family. In their family, when they have a meal together, parents and children sit together. We had a delicious meal. I sat next to one of Cindy's cousins who now lives in Vancouver, B.C., but she always comes home to celebrate the New Year with her family. It was fun to talk to her. Cindy's family is really nice and loud and the room was full of laughter with a bit of bickering and teasing. Families might look different and speak in different languages, but they still feel the same! Cindy brought up infamous wedding story where I insulted a room full of people on National Day. I can now tell when she's telling it in Chinese. Everyone had a good laugh about that.

Cindy and I had to leave during cake time, but not before Mrs. Sun had me join her in the Birthday song in English! It was really special to share that meal with them on a special day.

Tonight at work, I competed with fireworks outside the window while teaching my small star classes. The fireworks won out most of the time. They were just insane. My last class group and I watched as our school's neighbors threw fireworks out of their windows! It was pretty insane! At the end of the last class, the students were busy tracing the letter "G" on a worksheet while I went around helping them spell their names. One particularly loud firework went off and I yelped a bit. The children thought that was pretty funny, but they did learn a new adjective... "scared." "Teacher Coco is scared!" I'm never going to live that down, either!

I went to the gym tonight after work and watched an impressive fireworks show from the treadmill. It took me double the amount of time to walk home from the gym tonight. Partly, because I would stop and watch the fireworks and partly because I was trying to avoid getting caught on fire! It was just madness out there! The ground is just littered with debris. I wouldn't want to be cleaning all that up in the morning. Once I made it safely inside my complexes courtyard, I sat outside and watched a bit more of the show before going in to warm up.

Thank you, Beijing, for letting me join in our your Spring Festival this year. It's going to be a fortnight I'll never forget!