Chinese New Year Festivities in Chengdu

There is a word in Chinese that, when translated into English, sort of loses its meaning. That's because it has to be understood in context - mostly a cultural and experimental context. 热闹 or renao is when translated is literally "hot noisy." For the Chinese, this means crowded, noisy, and busy. People sometimes mistaken this to be a negative term, but let me tell you, Chinese people love renao.
Today is the 2nd day of the spring festival. Last night, my mom and I went over to Matt's place and cooked a "traditional" Chinese dinner. It's really hard to get authentic when all of the vegetable markets are closed, but we tried our best. We wanted to make 饺子or dumplings but because the market wasn't open for the holidays, we had to buy frozen ones instead of buying the dough and making our own. Besides dumplings, we had roasted duck and chicken, soy bean curd, Chinese sausages, and a soup of all sorts of seafood and meat balls - shrimp balls, fish balls, pork balls, fake crab meat (the pink and white stuff). All while eating, we were watching re-runs of CCTV's annual spring festival program. In the middle of watching an old Chinese movie called "The Knot," all hell broke lose with fireworks. And not with those ones that you would buy in the America at those stands outside of supermarkets. These were like the ones you would see at firework shows - right at eye-level outside of Matt's 6th floor apartment. Crazy! On our way home, I spotted some local, small vendors with carts of fireworks. Tonight is going to be a night of pyro-mania. And they are hella cheap too!

This morning, my mom and I headed down to Wen Shu Yuan, this temple in the middle of Chengdu. Growing up in LA and having attended all of these Chinese New Year Festivities as a kid, it was pure heaven. Renao and tons of it. So many kinds of 小吃 or little foods!!! Let's see if I can recount all of them: fried squid, Tibetan butter tea, fresh sugarcane juice, mala tofu flower, baked goods, dragon whisker candy, mud roasted chicken, stinky tofu, etc. There was just too much for my stomach to take it all! Besides the ones already listed, there was deer meat, fresh coconut, cold noodles, 5 friend quail eggs on a stick, insects (like grasshoppers, scorpions, bee/jacket larvae, beetles, etc) on a stick, all sorts of bean mixtures, etc. Man! You have got to love China during the holidays. People here sure do.