Crazy Mikey and the Lantern Festival

It was another rainy day. I invited Annie (May's 12 year old daughter) over to play with Michael. She came over and Michael went absolutely crazy. Running around in circles, yelling nonsense words at the top of his voice, throwing his toys all over the place, you name it. She had no idea what to do. She tried talking with him a few times to calm him down, and eventually gave up. Then Annie's cousin Jerry (who's around 9) came over, so they just played with Michael's toys while Michael danced around them.

All that activity must have tired him out, because he then slept for three hours, and that's when I started this blog. All my entries have been backdated, including this one.

After Michael woke up, we went over to May's house to see if anyone wanted to come see the lanterns at Sun Yat Sen Memorial Hall. Every year for a week and a half around the Lantern Festival, they have huge display of Lanterns with the theme being this year's animal on the Chinese calendar. Well, it's the year of the rat. Rats don't have the greatest appeal, so many of the lanterns were based on cute mice rather than rats. Now, these are not hand held lanterns. They are large, lit-up sculptures, mounted on pedastals. It's kind of like watching a parade of rat floats, except they are stationary, and you're doing the walking.

Every half hour or so, they do an sound and lights show with the "main" lantern, shown below, which this year was a ball made up of 5000 various plastic rats. Yes, I'm still wondering why I decided to go out into the rain to see this...


It's usually packed with people, but I was hoping that the crowds wouldn't be so bad because it was raining slightly. How wrong I was. Michael started saying "I want to go home now," after seeing about an eighth of the lanterns. The poor little guy could only see a sea of legs and a sky of umbrellas, with a glimpse of some glowing things here and there. But, he was pushed on so quickly by the crowds that he could never make out what it was.

We did make the entire round with Annie and Ailsa (another teaching assistant at my school who had been visiting May when we went over), but didn't enjoy it very much. We stopped at a noodle and dumpling restaurant to pick up some supper for Michael and I, then got on the bus to go home. Well, at least we got something to eat out of it!