When in Asia....

"When in Rome, do as the Romans do"?? Well, here in Asia tonight, the rough translation would be "when in Asia, set off lots of firecrackers"!

To be honest, I struggle to fully appreciate all aspects of the local culture. And the Lunar New Year celebration is one of the tougher things to fully appreciate, at least in my book. I mean, seriously, who in the world really likes listening to firecrackers?

Part of my dislike of the Lunar New Year stems from our experience last year, when we technically missed the actual New Year celebration because we were out of the country, but returned a few days later... only to discover that our apartment complex was in a continual power-outage/power-on cycle that would last for days on end, and that our neighbors had failed to use up all their firecrackers on New Year's eve and continued setting them off for ten more days! ARGH!

Matt, who generally handles cultural stress much better than I do, doesn't even remember last year's difficulties. At least that is his claim. I've been reminding him with helpful statements like "remember it was so cold in the apartment and we kept loosing power and all four of us slept in the same room to try to keep warm, except the two of us didn't really get any sleep and we wore layers of long underwear to bed and Lydia was just a little baby and you shared a single bed with Julianna and ....." I'm sure he's thankful I so helpfully reminded him of last year's joys. He keeps offering reassuring statements like, "I don't think it's as bad as you remember it honey". I remained unconvinced.

But, so far Matt has been right. It isn't as bad as I remember last year (this is at least in part because our power has remained on, which means I am not shivering as I sit at the keyboard!) This afternoon we ventured outside to "celebrate" with the locals. It was about 4:30, and the fireworks were starting to get cranked up. Pay attention at the beginning of the video (I took it with Matt's phone, so the picture is a little fuzzy). All that background noise? It's not poor video quality or wind rushing across the microphone.... nope, that's firecrackers. Notice that Matt has to lean close to Julianna so she can hear him!




It has only gotten louder since then! We will definitely still be awake at midnight - I cannot imagine sleeping through this racket. And I will take some more video then. After all, when in China.... if I'm not going to set off firecrackers, I might as well video the celebrations.

Oh yeah, and the little girls? Snoozing! It's all due to my favorite small appliance - the white noise machine. If you are a mom of young kids, and you live in an apartment or other similarly noisy community, you know the power of a good, loud white noise machine. Ours is cranked up to max volume and working its magic as we speak. It is like a wind tunnel in the girls room - I think a 747 could take off using our hallway as a runway and the girls would sleep right through it.

Nope, this is not last year's experience. Our apartment is warm. The girls are asleep in their own beds. And the neighbors are setting off boxes and boxes of firecrackers. Welcome to the year of the cow (ox).