Happy New Year!

I know I have been pretty quiet and haven’t been posting much, I spent the better part of January feeling pretty rotten. First I caught a cold/flu type bug that was going around and just as I was feeling better I ate something bad and spent another week purging my system and then about another week just to get my strength back as I ate very little for almost two weeks. But I’m doing fine now and looking forward to the new year and will try to post more often.

Today (Feb 13th, day ahead here) is Chinese New Year, which is also the beginning of what they call the “Spring Festival”. Yes that’s right, I said Spring, even though it doesn’t feel much like Spring here. In fact two days ago we had our first snowfall, which resulted in New Year snowmen popping up like above. The locals say there hasn’t been snow in Linyi for a couple of years so it is not a common thing. It pretty much paralyzed the city even though it was only a couple of inches.

I think it is wishful thinking on their part calling it the Spring Festival since they pretty much have to manufacture the feeling of Spring as like here;

or here;

One thing is for sure everyone gets into the spirit of New Year’s by shopping for all the required New Year’s paraphernalia, which creates organized chaos on the busy shopping streets.

That’s right, just park that e-bike anywhere you can find room;

Pretty much everything will shut down here for a few days as everyone returns home for family reunions. Like most festivals a lot of things revolve around food, and the street food carts get a lot of business.

And don’t forget to stop by the roadside sheep/goat butcher that just set up shop right on a busy corner of Tong Da Lu, the “Main Street” of Linyi, what’s a festival without a little mutton.

So there you go, little flavor of Chinese New Years here in Linyi!

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