The Lantern Festival

The fifteenth day of the Lunar New Year is celebrated as The Lantern Festival (if you are speaking English) or The Yuan Xiao Sweet Dumpling Festival (if you are speaking Chinese). It is also known as The Holiday I Hate Most. This year, The Holiday I Hate Most, that marks the end of the 15-day Chinese New Year holidays, fell on February 21st. For the holiday, the local park is decked out with lanterns that come on after dark. These lanterns are not the lanterns like you think of when you thinking of camping or from Little House on the Prairie. These are huge lanterns made of paper or plastic, the size of floats in parades, and are all lit up with electrical lights from inside (see photo for an example). The local city parks are FULL of these huge lanterns, some floating on the lakes in the middle of the parks, and the parks are also so full of people that you might get trampled. This is one reason not to like the holiday. Another reason not to like the holiday is the traffic caused by all the rich people driving cars trying to get to the park which is next door to my apartment building. The music blaring out of the park until midnight for weeks prior to the actual festival doesn't exactly endear this holiday to me either. However, the very worst thing about this holiday is that every single individual Chinese family apparently spends their entire savings (I exaggerate a bit, I'm sure) on FIREWORKS. I don't just mean loud firecrackers, but I also mean those pretty exploding lights in the sky. They were going off in front of my kitchen window, my bedroom window, my balcony window. All day, all night. They were all over town. Honestly, it sounded like the bombing of Baghdad, and though I was not fearful as I would be in a war zone, I was so stressed out that I could not stand it. I got my freaked-out dog and we got under the covers to drown out the noise and went to bed early. It was horrible, and it is the same every year. And THAT is NO exaggeration!