Chinese New Year in London

Dear Friends

You asked for photos and you will definetly get them in this post!

Before that, we (Nuno and Lu) would just like to say VERY HAPPY BIRTHDAY to Michael and Linda and wish all the happiness to them!!!!!!

Concerning the theme of this post, last Sunday we went to celebrate the 5th day of the Chinese New Year (related to wishings of abundant money) in Central London. There were several main places for the celebrations and we visited three of them: the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Chinatown and the Trafalgar Square.

The first spot (V&A) didn't have much to offer, just some lion & budha dancing with music playing outside the main door,

and demonstrations inside the museum of how to make traditional tea, noodles, caligraphy and crafts. We didn't stay there for more than half an hour and headed for Leicester Square to see some daily fireworks (it looked a bit of a waste in daytime...), which sounded like explosions of heavy artillery!

With a lot of smoke and burning smell on our lungs we (me, Lu and a friend of hers) went for lunch, where we were met by my two Portuguese friends, Silvestre and Sofia.

The streets were completely crowded in Chinatown, more lion dancing was going on and we just immersed ourselves in the crowd with our fine roosters :)

(this is called cock fight!!)

Check ot the endangered bear :)

The next stop was Trafalgar Square, here a stage was set and performances were going on. Most of the artists came from Beijing, check them out:

As you can imagine it was a very nice day, the five of us had a lot of fun and we now feel very "roostered" for 2005 :) I finished my day in the pub thinking about the misteries of chinese culture...

Big hugs for all of you