KUNG HEI FAT CHOI or HAPPY CHINESE NEW YEAR

I stole a tiny section from this website which explains a little bit about a person born in the year of the Rabbit:
Positive: The Rabbit can be sensitive, tactful. home-loving, refined, prudent, discreet, long-living, ambitious, cultured, well-mannered, artistic, considerate, scholarly, suave, graciously hospitable, modest and unimpeachably virtuous.

Negative: The Rabbit can also be snobbish, secretive, pedantic, complicated, haughtily indifferent, self-indulgent, hypochondriacal, punctilious, judgemental, self-righteous, deceptive, self-centred and terminally condescending.

Today was the first day in the New Year for the Chinese calendar. The year of the rabbits, more specifically the metal rabbit. Here in the Philippines it's a pretty big firecracker holiday. There's also parades, street parties and other random Chinese celebrations. We went today downtown to the the festivities around dinner time to get some grub and to try and catch a few of the dragon dancers. We were pretty early for dinner and since we were locating ourselves at the end of the parade we had time to burn. We went to the Lagoon to feed the fish and check out some of the animals from the Chinese Calendar. They have each animal lined up around the Lagoon with a summary of the different characteristics a person has born in the year of that animal. When the fish food was all gobbled up we headed to get our own dinner along the main strip and finished just in time to catch the parade. The first thing that we saw was a long skinny dragon dancing towards us. It was pretty cool. They kept lighting off firecrackers around where they were dancing so it looked like the dragon was dancing through fog. I thought it looked great! I think the loud firecrackers made Maddy a little jumpy but she didn't freak out or anything, she just clung pretty close to Ryan.

Right behing the long skinny dragon were these big furry dragons. I thought they looked great but they turned off of the main parade path and went down the little side street where all the lights and stalls were set up. Ryan had taken Maddy a little ways down to get away from all the firecrackers when one of the big dragons came up behind them and really freaked her out. I don't think she had a clue what it was and maybe thought it was going to eat her! Ryan said she just tensed right up and started shaking like she was shivering from the cold (only it's hot out). On either side of the dragons were some people dressed up and carrying these unlit lanterns. They seemed to be apart of the parade but they weren't really doing too much other then following it down the road. Who knows.

By the time we had walked a little bit it was starting to get dark and bedtime was getting nearer. The streets looked amazing all lit up with lanterns, fancy balloons and street venders selling their glow toys. I just love my camera because I think it takes great pictures in the night and really captures all the colours even with the limited lighting. LOVE.

Happy Chinese New Year everyone and hopefully the year of the rabbit will be a good one for us all.