In the past weeks I read so many blog posts about the Chinese New Year and how the people will celebrate it and whatnot all. Here in Germany in my little hometown it is a bit different. Sure we would love to celebrate New Year but first of all we only hoped this time not to get sick again as all the past year. We had so bad luck each January/ February with our health that we already prepared all the medication for a week with high fever in bed. But some wonder happened and we stayed healthy! That was indeed already something new for us and actually all we hoped for.
Back in Finland we had this big New Year celebration in Helsinki city center but here in my hometown? Not so much. Even though there are pretty many Chinese living here (we know perhaps 5% of them) there is never any event taking place. Of course they always plan to celebrate with some nice food and invite many friends over but that never happens. Thing is this is still Germany and there are no holidays over the Lunar New Year so people are just too busy to actually celebrate on a working day. We had “holidays” ourselves as we are exporting to China and we just have no customers at all for an entire week due to the holidays over there.
So what can you do when there is authentic Chinese restaurant anywhere nearby and the supermarkets have only limited amount of ingredients for making some nice Chinese dishes? You do nothing but stay home, eat snacks, have video chats with the family in China all the while the Chinese New Year Gala is blaring from the TV. I must say it was a rather uneventful day for us and my wife was a bit down as all chat groups were filled with pictures and videos of the food in China while she was stuck with some grapes and chips.
But it all ain’t bad as this uneventful day and the entire weeks gave us time for other things. My wife finally started studying for her driving license again after starting it back in 2017! I also had time to do some video editing and finished our holiday “movie” from 2015 and started now the editing process for 2016 in which we had the crazy city tour in China.
How did you celebrate the Chinese New Year?
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here in town thought it would be on Saturday the 06.02.2016. Imagine the surprise when my wife heard from one of her customers on that Saturday that there won’t be any New Year Gala as it wouldn’t start until Sunday… this shows pretty well what living abroad for so many years does to someone when it comes to such big festivities. Anyways after a disappointing Saturday we started Sunday with preparing for the overeating day. My wife prepared several dishes while I was busy entertaining our little Monkey/ Nathan. Pictures were taken, food was enjoyed, the CCTV New Year Gala was watched and many video chats had to be endured during that day. As you can see it was a pretty calm day for us especially as my wife didn’t had to work and thus we spend the entire day together. Besides that Nathan was finally able to wear some of the clothes my wife bought for him in China last year. Only bad thing about the dress was that the hat didn’t fit anymore, Nathan just got too much brain inside.
Crazy Chinese Family 