“Rooaarrr”, welcome in the year of the Tiger! I am spending the New Years with Angie’s family in Guizhou, and celebrate it in the totally like the Chinese. The Chinese way of spending the New Years differs at some points from the European way. Today is the first day of the New Year and yesterday was the BIG Niansanshi (translated ‘Year30’) – the last day of the old year – the year of the Ox. The core of Niansanshi is based around 'eating' and 'spending time with the family'. After waking up we went to Angie’s Yeye and Nainai (grandparents from fathers side). We spend the day together making dumplings and preparing more food for the dinner. The TV was on in the background with a Chinese action movie. The plan was to start eating at 16pm, so you can also have dinner with the other family LaoYe and LaoLao (mothers side) a second time on that day.
All the cooking with over 20 dishes was took more time than plannend and we started our first big meal at 17.30h. Before you start to eat you set off the Chinese fireworks, in front of your door. Since most people are eating around the same time, it turned out to be quite a 'noisy', but definitely a pleasant and delicious meal, with cheering (drinking the Chinese hard liquour Baijiu) to the New Year and wishing each other fortune and good health in the year to come. There was a big bowl of Dumpling – and in one of them was a coin hidden. The one finding the coin got RMB 200,- of the the Uncle of Angie (it was his turn this year). It wasn’t me this year – I ate quite some dumpling, but no luck. The tradition goes that eating many dumpling on New Year eve is good for your fortune in the coming year (so I will need to be a little more patient). 
After the first meal we went over to the other family. We definitely ate too much already and arrived too late to do the second ´real´ meal. Angie still ate some little snacks – I wasn’t able to eat more at all. We started to play Majiang I joined the game in the beginning, but after one hour the uncles and aunts were ready to play for ´real´ (money) with the advanced rules (I had to give my chair away). The TV was broadcasting the Chinese Big New Years evening gala on the background, but everybody concentrated on the game, while talking and laughing. When the clock hit 12 hours the noise outside was huge – never heard so mu
ch noisy fireworks at once. However, inside there was no special 12-o´clock moment as we are used to in Holland, everybody just continued to play Majiang. At 0.30h we went home and were ready for bed, no big party in the evening and in Anshun are no bars. It was a nice experience yesterday, and today the streets are all very quiet, the New Years holiday has begun, time to stay home or spend time with the family outside. That’s what we did today. We went one of the longest suspension Bridges in Asia – the brand new Balinghe Bridge, opened in 2009 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_longest_suspension_bridge_spans). We were not the only ones. Hundreds of families came out to experiences one of these human wonders – definitely something too be ´proud´ of. Personally I am definitely well integrated again in the Chinese life. Work is going well (many, many projects and things running – wont go into it now), the language is slowly improving (this was a good week), started following a Jazz Theory class at the JZ every Saturday morning, and had a very nice house-warming party in my new place (everybody is really enthusiastic about the place – me too). Further I´ve decide to start Twittering a lot more this year: http://twitter.com/basovertoom.
