新年快乐！Happy new year! A lunar new year has started and now it is officially the year of the monkey. The Lunar New Years is also known as Spring Festival, because according to their tradition, now spring begins.
As I said in my last post, I spent the holiday in Xi'an, Shaanxi province. On New Year's Eve absolutely everything closed! I expected stores to be closed, I expected restaurants to be closed. It was even ok that museums were closed. But even public parks were closed! Xi'an is one of the top 4 tourist destinations in China and they should think about the tourists. Not only us foreigners were looking for places to go, but many Chinese travelers would show up at the museum, for example, to find it's doors locked. And then, for no reason at all, a mall was open, with absolutely no one in there except the unfortunate people working.
Because everything was closed, it was a resting day. At night, we decided to walk inside the old city walls and check out the local celebrations. Lots of firecrackers, fireworks and people burning stuff for the dead.
Boys outside a restaurant throw firecrackers in the street, adding to the incessant noise and overwhelming smell of burnt gunpowder.
On New Year's Eve, it's a tradition to burn fake money in honor of dead loved ones. Basically, instead of burning real money, you trade it for a larger volume of fake money, just so it lasts longer. As you can see on the ground, they draw a circle with an opening on one side and put the paper to burn in there. I noticed that no opening was ever facing another. I'm sure there is a meaning to it.
This little girl was very scared of the fire. Her grandmother would tell her to throw the money in but at first she wouldn't. After a few tears, she gathered the courage.
Right at the bottom of the east side of the old city walls, an old man burns tons of paper.
These here were just a few meters past the old man in the previous picture. In the back you can see the guard towers of the old city walls. Obviously, in the old days, when the walls were used for protection, the towers weren't as bright and colorful.
View from the other side of the walls, outside. Now there is a sort of park with a pathway and trees that surrounds the wall, and then the moat. All this was reconstructed in the 90's and 00's, I believe. It's not exactly original, but it's supposed to look just like it did centuries ago.