I ♥ 上海: 二月。新年快乐！ Happy New Year!

新年快乐！
HAPPY NEW YEAR!
Feb. 13 - 14. 2010

It's the year of the Tiger and Chinese families are getting ready to celebrate the New Year! We went to the Food Mall today to get a few snacks for our New Year's Eve party..and this is what the mall looked like. No wonder the roads were empty-- 怪不的外面没有人！everyone is shopping to buy food to celebrate!

请进请进～ 1201 欢迎你！
Welcome to 1201's new year party (:
Since we had no special plans for the New Year and we thought it would be way to hectic to travel..we decided to have a little party at our apartment. We wanted to take advantage of our opportunity to celebrate the Chinese New Year in China, so we tried to get as Chinese as possible. Meaning, we bought a few decorations, hung as much red onto the walls as possible and had our own New Year's Eve dinner (nian ye fan- 年夜饭）

Similar to the West where we feast on Christmas Eve, the Chinese have a huge dinner on New Year's Eve. They typically have fish (鱼), chicken (鸡）, duck (鸭), and vegetables (蔬菜) as the main course and then rice cakes (nian gao- 年糕）as dessert.
As shown in the picture,, we clearly feasted well on delicious Chinese food :) We ate very well-- 我们吃了满满的饭

At every New Year's Eve dinner, Chinese families eat fish because it symbolizes a profitable year ahead. The word for "surplus" in Chinese is jie yu (结余）which sounds similar to the word for fish (yu - 鱼). -- 因为 “鱼” 的发音跟结余的 “余” 一样，“有鱼” 就成了 “有余”，意思是希望在新的一年里大家生活得更好，家家都 ”有余“！！

Here is some more of the food we had-- don't worry..it wasn't just me and Min eating all this food! We had about 10 people to share all this food with (we still had about half left over!)

Here are all of our decorations--yes, we bought a plastic lantern to set the mood of our celebration. The 副 sign in the middle of our masterpiece means happiness. On Chinese New Year, people hang this 副 characters on doors, but they hang them upside down. They hang the 副 upside down to signify that happiness is coming.

Part II of our New Year's Eve! 第二部分

It is also tradition to 包饺子 (bao jiao zi) make dumplings on New Year's Eve. Luckily we had our Chinese roommate with us (and Min-- our 华侨－Native Chinese that lives overseas) to teach us the art of making dumplings! We made way too much and couldn't finish a fourth of what we ate, but it was fun making them! Our roommate told us that families typically make dumplings at midnight, but we started a little bit earlier at around 10 PM before we went out to see what the rest of 上海 Shanghai was up to!

As you can see, making dumplings is a very messy process! We first rolled out the dough into a long snake-like roll, so that we could cut the dough into small pieces. Then, we flattened the small pieces out with our hands by rolling and pushing down on the dough in circular rotations. After the dough looked like a flat circle, we put a little bit of filling (mushrooms + chai, pork+celery) onto the circle and folded it up! We had to make sure that it was tightly closed because if not, the filling would spill out while it cooked.
The steps:

Part III of our New Year's Eve! 第三部分

Another popular past time of New Years is...fire works!! 鞭炮！Although it's supposedly prohibited (禁止) in big cities, people still do it anyways. Fireworks works were going off continuously throughout the night and it really set the whole mood for New years. We could see people right outside of our building setting off fireworks (放鞭炮) and it was really exciting!

We were so close up to the fireworks it was amazing! All of us sat on the window ledge to look out the window~~

Part IV of our New Year's Eve! 第四部分

So, New Years is a time for celebration and fun! Have fun with your friends and family..and if you're in China, don't forget to make your 中国朋友 (Chinese Friends)