This is a time of year when business shuts down for roughly ten days, and all the folks head back home to be with their families. The holiday has all the gaiety, family tradition - and psychological baggage - that Christmas has in the west.
Everyone gets together for a sumptuous dinner on New Year's eve. After dinner folks sit around chatting, catching up on family gossip - and, of course, playing Mah Jong (notice how they start training them young) - waiting for midnight when they welcome in the New Year with the thing that I like best about the whole thing - fireworks, fireworks, and more fireworks.
Traditionally, Lunar New Year was a celebration of the coming of spring and the end of winter - so little red squares of paper get stuck up everywhere with the phrase Spring written on them (in Chinese characters, of course). But they are invariably pasted up upside down - which is a clever pun since the word that expresses Has Come (as in Spring has come) also has the meaning of Fell Down (as in upside down). So, pasting Spring upside down is saying that Spring Has Come.
One of the latest fads among those aspiring to be at the heighth of fashion is to have your hair colored - which comes out reddish to blondish. Why anyone would subject their lustrous jet-black tresses to the prolonged, harsh, chemcical torture required to achieve the effect (it takes several expensive treatments and the result is not all that attractive, in my opinion) is beyond me - but there is no accounting for fads and fashion.
The man in the yellow sweater is Tanya's older brother - he is a Tae-Kwon-Do instructor. In addition to being an instructor for the Police Department, he runs a small school where he instructs all comers - male and female; children to adults. The three young women in the back row of the third picture are his daughters. The one at the left is on the national Tae-Kwon-Do team and has won the Taiwan national championship in her division, as well as several gold medals at international events. The photo at the far right is one of Tanya's younger brothers and his wife enjoying some of the New Year's delicacies.
Click on a photo to see an enlargement.
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With spring comes warm weather and the kids got in likes of biking and skating. Getting them skating was my excuse to get a pair of skates for myself. It's enough like ice skating - which I did LOTS of back in Minnesota - that I could get on and get going right away, but with wheels and concrete you don't get a bite like you do with blades and ice, and it's a little disconcerting not to have that feedback. Lots of fun, though.
Click on a photo to see an enlargement.
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The cute little kid at the end of the group of photos is a picture that Cousin Victor sent along of his grandson, Joshua, taken last December. If anyone has any photos that they would like to put up, by all means email them to me.