Hey everyone!  Sorry it’s been a while, I told you we would be posting in a few days but we got a puppy so we’ve been really busy with him and very tired.  Not to mention we are back in school now so that adds to our business.  I hope you enjoyed part 1 of the Beijing trip.  Here’s part 2: New Year!

Chinese New year is a HUGE deal!  Especially when it’s the year of the dragon!  I imagine New Year was crazy all over China, but being in the capitol to bring in the year of the dragon was simply amazing.  Sasha, Rachel, and I started out the evening by heading to a bar.  Unfortunately, it was pretty empty- most of the people there were foreigners.  The Chinese people value spending time with family instead of going out. 

At about 11:45 the bartender and the waitress went outside with the BIGGEST roll of fire crackers I’ve ever seen!  They laid it down on the street; it was so long they had to loop it back around!  They lit the everlasting roll of fire crackers and it made the loudest sound I’ve ever heard!  I felt it vibrate in my heart!  We spent the next half an hour looking at the fireworks.  It wasn’t so much of a show as it was a free for all of fireworks in the sky.  Everyone was lighting them.  There wasn’t a moment when the sky wasn’t lit up and you heard a constant “boom.”  We started to get cold, so we thought we’d call it a night and head back to the hotel.  That was an adventure.  First, we walked the long way (don’t ask why, we just did).  We ended up at a little bridge on the other side of the park where the bar was.  There were a lot of foreigners there watching the fireworks being lit literally right in front of you.  Now… these aren’t just small ones we do in Oregon.  They were lighting the illegal in Oregon one’s two feet from people and right by trees!  As we were admiring the fireworks being shot up, one of the boxes falls over toward the bridge we were standing on.  Instead of the fireworks shooting up, they shot out into the crowd!  Everyone screamed and ran away, including the police!  Just when we thought it was over, it happened a second time!  We managed to survive and made it out with all of our limbs, thank God. 

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We finally made it to the street and we began looking for a taxi.  That was the most frustrating thing about Beijing!  It’s so big and a lot of the time the taxi driver doesn’t know where to go, so they just say no.  It took us a good twenty minutes to flag down a taxi.  We finally think we can go home because we are freezing.  The driver says he doesn’t know where our hotel is.  He refused to take us.  So he kicked us out and we were back in the cold.  By the way, it was 9 ˚ F outside.  It was impossible to get a taxi because they were all taken.  So we had to walk back to the hotel.  The bar we were at was near the Forbidden City… about 2.5 or 3 miles from our hotel. After walking about 2 miles, I see hope.  A car with a red light in the window is driving toward us!  I frantically wave my arms (I couldn’t feel them so they were probably flailing).  I caught his attention and he pulls over.  He told us he didn’t know where the hotel was but we were not about to lose another taxi so we directed him to our hotel.  It took us a while to regain feeling in our bodies, but we managed to survive!

The next morning Sasha and I went to the Temple Fair- the biggest New Year’s fair in the country.  There’s not much to report there- we were honestly expecting a lot more.  It seemed like a state fair to us.  The only thing that baffled us was how many people were there.  Our tour guide told us that 300,000 people came to the fair.  We figured that was an “all day” number, but now we think it was an “at once” number!

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That night we lit off sparklers and little firecrackers.  It was really fun because the bell hop came out and played with us!  We never got his name but we called him “homeboy.” 

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New Year was really fun in Beijing.  I’m glad we got to spend it in the capitol city.  The rest of the trip we relaxed shopped and ate a lot of Pizza Hut!  That was pretty much our trip to Beijing.  It rocked!

We haven’t posted in a while because we got a puppy when we got back from Beijing.  He’s a lot of work.  We thought he was maybe 5 weeks old because he’s TINY and his teeth weren’t even all in.  Not to mention he had a hard time walking when we got him!  His name is YiDu (EE-do).  That’s the name of our city.  He’s small and black with a little white on his chest and back feet.  We’ve pretty much been paying a lot of attention to him and trying to potty train him, which has been a full time job.  We’ve had him for three weeks and he already looks bigger.  We took him to the vet to get his first rabies shot and to get him aged.  We were expecting him to be about 5 weeks old but the doctor says he’s about 8 weeks old and no more than 90 days.  He’s TINY!  He loves us a lot and his potty training is going pretty well.  He was too little to go outside when we got him, so we were doing potty pads, but we just started taking him outside.  He’s more interested in eating the dirt, but I think his fascination will subside when he gets used to being outside.

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Hopefully we’ll post soon.  Thanks for reading the blog.  We are on the downward slope of coming home!  We are really excited to come back and see you guys.  It will be hard to leave China though.  We are having a great time.