Feast For the Senses: Chinese New Year ’07

The past few days – hell, even the past few weeks – but in particular, this past week has been such a sensory overload. I love it. I have gone through a lot, seen a lot of new/interesting stuff, read all kinds of things, experienced stuff – it has been quite a feast for my senses. And so many moments have occurred that, as in my last post, I think to myself, I should blog this! Alas, I never do. But let’s try this time, shall we?

This past weekend I was in NYC, thanks to a friend, because she was in the Chinese New Year celebrations taking place in Chinatown. My fiance and I went, and it was really our first time in Chinatown (kinda sad, I know), though we’ve walked through it before. The streets were ablaze in color, from the confetti strewn everywhere to the various lion dances that were taking place. It was a lot of fun! I brought along my new DSLR for its second trip out into the real world (the first being an outing to take pics of the NYC skyline). I was a bit hesitant to bust it out at first, taking pictures with my trusty Canon, but then I saw another fellow photographer snapping away with his bigger-than-mine DSLR and it was all over from then. A couple of hours and 500 pictures later, we emerged from the milieu to partake in some dinner at the Green Tea Cafe.

It was a lot of fun watching the little kids running around whenever a confetti popper went off. Confetti poppers were tubes of pressurized air and confetti. Whenever you turned them, the top would pop off, releasing the confetti into the air. For most of the day, we were standing by one shop where the man would keep popping them every so often – particularly when things were getting quiet. Just when the excitement was dying down, he would release more of these and the kids would go crazy yet again. I wish I had my “mad photo-taking skills” because I could have gotten some great pictures; alas, I am still working on them. My favorite photo though, and my current desktop background, was of this little girl who I was able to capture as she ran around trying to catch a piece of confetti from the air. Adorable! 🙂

Another great moment was when we were walking around and encountered an older man who was trying to use one of the poppers. My fiance was walking around with his two empty tubes, so the man came over to us thinking we would know how to get one of those things to work. My fiance showed him, and I took pictures of the guy freeing the confetti. Very cute.

And then, after standing in the cold for hours, eating dinner in the front of the restaurant where the door was constantly opening and closing with people coming and going, doing a tiny bit of probably-overinflated-prices-because-it’s-the-new-year-and-everyone-and-their-mother-is-in-Chinatown shopping, and it being the first day of my period, I whined and complained and we took a taxi back to Penn Station to catch the train back home. 🙂

Good times!

[Part I of the Feast for the Senses series.]