Beginning the year

The Spring Festival holiday lasts two weeks in China. New Year's Eve is the first day of the Holiday and the last is the Lantern Festival. The Lantern Festival is becoming popular abroad as well, since it's one of the more festive Chinese holidays. Lanterns are already hung around town for the Spring Festival and my understanding is that several will be flown on Saturday for the Lantern Festival. If you've never seen it, this is one of the holidays where the sky is filled with lanterns which, when lit, function as miniature hot air balloons. It sounds impressive, but I don't know if there's one place that people go in Chenzhou to send their lanterns skyward, so I'll try to figure out if any of my friends  are doing it this year.

In any case, the year is starting off with a bang. Sort of. I've been glued to foreign news trying to figure out what Donald Trump will do next. People here aren't too worried about it. Chinese people are never worried about the news. The Great Wall isn't just a literal wall in China, there's also a cultural barrier that makes the outside world little more than a novelty most of the time. Even the foreigners feel it while there here. There's a tendency even to just tune out of the news and focus on what's going on here. I fell into that last year and made it my New Year's resolution to start paying attention to the news more. As far as my personal life, not much has changed. The school I moved back to Chenzhou to work at is just getting started. I did a small demo class today at an art school. We're working with them to try to get some of their students to sign up for ours. Parents often send their kids to extra schooling after the normal school day is over and, usually, every night of the week is occupied in this way: Monday night, piano; Tuesday night, dance; Wednesday night, karate; Thursday night, English classes... and so on and so forth. Then we'll have classes all day on the weekends.

After the excitement of the Holiday

Well, technically the holiday is still going on. Chinese New Year was last week and the festivities last for about a week, then there's a week of dead time before everyone heads back to work. We're still in Spring Festival week, the week after the Chinese New Year. That's when the Chinese mark the start of spring, which is obviously wrong because it's still cold as hell here. Actually, I'm exaggerating. It's cold today. At the time of this writing, but the weather is supposed to warm up into the low 20s over the weekend. That's pretty warm for February. And we've had several warm spells over the winter, such that we've only ever had a few weeks of cold weather at one time. It does get down close to freezing when its cold, but that isn't that bad when we're talking about a nighttime low.

The weather here used to be colder. Whenever people show me pictures from ten years ago or before, there's always snow on the ground and people are bundled up. Now, it almost never snows. In fact, there was a huge ice storm in 2008 that shut the city down, destroyed trees and power lines, and resulted in several deaths. That was the last time it snowed here. Before that, the river flooded and destroyed the old part of town, called Yu Hou Jie. That part of town was rebuilt in the traditional Chinese style and is now a popular area of town for bars, restaurants, shops, etc. There's also a great little Hostel in that neighborhood.

Yu Hou Jie was a popular place for people to go for New Year celebrations. There were a whole lot of fireworks going off for the new year, so that was fun to watch.

Yu Hou Jie on a warm day, just prior to the New Year

It's also growing in popularity as a place to go for dinner and drinks, though housing construction has stopped in the neighborhood, likely due to the reluctance of businesses to return to the neighborhood. Prior to the flood, the neighborhood was known for crime and poverty. Now, people have returned in substantial numbers, but stores have been more cautious. Restaurants seemed to be the first to return, and several payed the price, attested to by several that had to shut their doors after only a few years.

Overall, though, I think the prospect is good for the neighborhood. Most of the commercial space is filled and the variety of businesses is promising. Currently, it has everything from Hostels to Hair salons. There's even an Italian restaurant there, the only one I know of in Chenzhou.