Chinese New Year

We were invited out to see the coming of the (Chinese) New Year in Yokohama by one of our evening students, Yumi, on Thursday. Why Yokohama? well it has a very large China town with a beautiful temple (pictured).

It was a real experience, as we got closer and closer to china town we could hear the music and firecrackers. We turned the corner and saw a gathering of people, in amongst the crowd was a dragon, dancing to the music and going from shop to shop.

The dragon went from shop to shop dancing and eventually jumping up and grabbing a little red packet (which contains money, I think it is some kind of good luck New Year thing). All the while there are people playing drums, clashing cymbals and letting off firecrackers, it was a little overwhelming but an impressive spectacle.

We visited the temple, which was much more.....bright/tacky than Japanese temples, lots of gold and statues, but when all lit up it looked amazing, something that my phone camera couldn't capture (I forgot my camera at home sorry).

For dinner we went to a "tabehodai" or all you can eat restaurant, very nice, we had a wide array of Chinese foods including: the Century Egg
which wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it would be, it was just a very eggy egg.

Well that about wraps it up for the New Year festivities, a good night out