Happy Lunar New Year!

So, it's the biggest holiday in Asia going on in Hanoi right now and I am... listening to the sound of silence.  Quiet.  It's strange, but kinda nice.  All the pushy street vendors and moto-taxi drivers are gone.  Gone home to their families for the holidays.  Gone for days.  I feel like I'm missing out on some of the cultural experiences I was expecting, but it hasn't been totally uneventful.

Tet gift packs that include dried, sugar-coated fruit and special paper shrines.

The first night of Têt (the Vietnamese word for the Lunar New Year) was a blast!  Literally.  There were fireworks displays all over the city.  Though I only saw one, I was totally blown away.  Puns aside, the display was the most artfully produced fireworks events I've ever seen.  When I was in South Korea I saw a fireworks festival display over the Han River which was put on by three internationally renowned teams from Canada, China and Korea.  That didn't hold a candle to this.

There were three separate launch points set up around Hoan Kiem Lake that all put on a synchronized show.  I didn't get the best spot to watch the fireworks from because it was simply impossible to move through the mass of bodies squeezed together by the lakeside.  It didn't matter much, though.  Even with the trees covering some of the show it was wildly impressive.  It might have helped that the fireworks were fired and detonated so close to where I viewed the show from.  My little spot was right next to one of the launch points and I don't think the fireworks were going any higher than maybe 200 feet in the air.  Reverberations from both the launch and the detonation shook my whole body over and over again.

At the end of the show, the crowd cheered before trying to dissipate.  I'm not sure how many thousand people were there, but the flow of people down the street to my house blocked traffic for at least ten minutes.

On the way I saw people burning the little shrines they had erected that morning.  Burnt offerings for their ancestors were followed by offerings of rice scattered about the pavement.  One cute little child was so caught up in the rice-throwing that she tossed some all over me.

The excitement is over and I'm not entirely disappointed.  The daily hustle and bustle of Hanoi can be pretty nerve-wracking.  It's nice to be able to walk down the sidewalk which is normally impassable due to the plethora of stalls and parked moto-bikes.

The Turtle Tower with the Communist Party building in the background.

Happy Lunar New Year to all y'all!