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Happy New Year from Beijing – Today is New Year’s Day, the First day of Spring in the Chinese calendar and the start of the 10 day Spring festival. The above video is the fireworks across the road from our apartment building, Actually it was largely IN the street. You can see in the background and reflected in the building’s windows the fireworks going off in other streets.
That was last night, today is the first day that I have ever seen on which most businesses were closed. The restaurants mostly seem to be open even if the stores are closed. We went for a walk around the neighbourhood and saw piles of red paper left from exploding the fireworks last night.  Every driveway to apartment complexes in the area were covered in explosion debris and boxes of empty roman candles and other fireworks.
We went for a quick walk around Si De park (it was, afterall, minus 2 degrees) and then into Maan Coffee for a Latte and in my case a pair of Korean sliders, while Debbie had a BLT which had a fried egg in it. Victoria , who is visiting for the holidays had a kiwi juice which looked and Victoria confirmed was delicious. We then walked down to the Richmond park and cased April Gourmet which is an Australian based grocery chain that has a lot of western products.
On the way back we passed a few people all of whom we wished happy new year and got welcome responses. We then had dumplings for lunch like all the Chinese have on New Year’s leaving some on the plate as is customary in China to show how prosperous one is and to bring more prosperity in the coming year.