25.1.2009 von Ines.

The last day of the year of the rat! We received text messages to inform the public that fire works and rife crackers were allowed within the 5 th ring road of Beijing starting from midnight. Strangely we have been hearing fire crackers already the last few days. This is the first year that real fire works are allowed. But somehow I remember seeing them in one of the past New Years too. We made dinner at home as we assumed all restaurants would be closed or at least hardly any one open tonight. At midnight everybody went crazy with fire crackers. There were some beautiful huge fire works as well.

But the main thing is fire crackers as loud as possible to scare away all the bad demons of the New Chinese Year. They have rolls and carpets of fire crackers that you just light on the one side and it goes on forever. It soon got really smokey in our yard. Especially because some people started the idea of putting the boxes of firecrackers inside a cardboard box and then lighting them hoping to make louder sounds. Instead I had the feeling that it just created more smoke and it was shooting burning cardboard pieces all over the place.

I also found it great that they just lighted the fire crackers in the middle of the road.

Here is the link to my snap video of Chinese New Years Eve. And the noise is the actual fire crackers that in reality sound more like bombs. Happy “Niu” Year as the Chinese say this year. Because “Niu” means cow and this is the year of the cow.

Geschrieben in China, Beijing | 1 Kommentar »

25.1.2009 von Ines.

As the weather had been cold till yesterday we decided to go ice skating on one of the lakes of Beijing. It was strange to see that the one side of the lake was not completely frozen. But it was open for ice skating.

They started charging entrance tickets to get onto the frozen lake last year. But I found this year it is even more horrible as they had put up a fence around the whole lake and even at the section for the swimming. but it was nice to be outdoors in the sunshine.

As always there was hardly anybody ice skating. Unfortunately the few Chinese guys who could actually ice skate were not there. They might have been at home as it is Chinese New Year. But there is enough other things for the Chinese to play with on the ice. The most popular is the ice chairs with the screw drivers welded to poles:

This year there were also more ice bikes seen:

If you feel like an emperor you can also be pulled around the lake on a yellow cushioned sheep sleigh, even though we did not see anybody do that:

Maybe you need to be wearing the new hat fashion like these 2 Chinese guys to be able to sit on the sleigh:

This year they also started to close the lake at 4pm. We used to skate at night. When we were leaving we only left our skate rink circle behind:

Geschrieben in Outdoors, Beijing | 1 Kommentar »