Our 1st Chinese New Year

Last week marked the beginning of the new lunar year, so we had the chance to experience our first Chinese New Year in Hong Kong.

My opinion is that the very best part of Chinese New Year is that last Thursday and Friday were public holidays! Yay! So, we had a nice long weekend with Brendan at home.

Our apartment complex has a large parking garage downstairs where they held a Chinese New Year festival with dragon dance (and other traditional blessing ceremonies that we are not at all familiar with). Since it was so close, we thought we might as well go down and check it out.

A sweet lady who Brendan works with blessed Charlotte with an adorable Chinese outfit, so we got Charlotte dressed up...

Then went downstairs to pose with the CNY decorations...

Then, to the parking garage for the festivities...

Some kind of blessing of the apartment building
was happening here

Dragon dancers getting ready

The group then proceeded to each tower to bless
each one for the coming year

We also found out that Charlotte has hit an age where loud noises and strange people dancing around in costume scare her...go figure! :) This was her response to our CNY experience...

There is much much more we would love to share with you all about Chinese New Year but will have to wait for future posts (which we really want to get around to doing!). Very intricate tradition is wrapped up in CNY that we only scratched the surface of this year.

It is by far the most unique cultural experience we've had in our past year living abroad.