Chinese New Year with a Family.

I’m getting on better with Xiao Bai now. This little creature I’m dog-sitting looks like a tiny arctic fox. She is so cute, I don’t even mind that she bites me when I try to put a leash on her for a walk.

I spent Chinese New Year’s eve with her human family. My colleague (whose family it is, informs me they are a typical family). There were seven of us all together. Just after I arrived, we ate a big meal of dumplings and other Chinese home-cooked dishes, then at 8pm settled onto the enormous leather sofa to watch the New Year Gala show on an enormous flat-screen TV.

People are supposed to go outside at midnight to set off fireworks to celebrate the New Year. The family I was with got so bored with the New Year Gala show that by 10.30pm they decided they would do the fireworks now. So we went out and did that, then I went back to a neighbouring apartment block with the 13-year old grand-daughter who wanted to check up on her dog. Her dog’s hair was way too long and dragged on the floor, but she told me she loved it like that, and offered it to me to sniff.

I sat petting the dog, while she played Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata to show me her skill. It was really good. I could not tell the difference between that and a CD I have of it at home. Suddenly there were bangs everywhere so we knew it was midnight and went outside to watch some really big, powerful, expensive fireworks going off. It was really loud and her 13-year old ears couldn’t stand it and she wanted to go in. Then I thought I was probably a bit deaf because it didn’t bother me.

I stayed the night as it was difficult to get home, and the bangs stopped around 2am, but started again around 6am when a neighbouring family decided to set a load more off then. Chinese fireworks are really really loud. It was quiet for 10 minutes, then a cockerel started crowing from the neighbouring hutong, which has remained so that the workers who build the apartment blocks have somewhere to live whilst they build them. I had to stay for lunch as well. I thought I was just going for dinner but I didn’t get home until 22 hours later.

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