Chinese New Year was on the 18th of this month, but for some reason, the city of Boston has their celebration a week later.My Lady Faire, Terzo, and I headed into the city yesterday to check out the festivities. Not surprisingly, I went through a lot of film very quickly. I had never been to anything like this before and had no idea what to expect. Unfamiliar with how the rituals go, I was completely oblivious to the rhythm of the whole thing and squeezed the shutter at all the wrong moments.
So, after many bad shots, I finally started to recognize the flow: the lions dance a bit (they’re not dragons as most would believe, myself included), and whenever possible they would enter stores and restaurants. I imagine this was largely dependent on the size of the store because the lion heads are huge and thrashing around quite a bit. Then an offering(?) of lettuce and oranges is given to the lion, where they “eat” and toss the remains into the crowd. When the lion couldn’t enter a store, this act happened right outside it. Most of the time, a decent brick of firecrackers were lit (outside, of course) after the offering and the lion moved on. I was never able to get a shot of the firecrackers because there were just too many people in the way.
We took all of this in for about an hour and a half and decided to go to lunch. We ate at Buddha’s Delight, a strictly vegetarian restaurant a couple floors up from the street. The food was just fantastic and if I lived within five miles of the place, I’d probably eat there every day. I had a great view of the festivities but was particularly taken by the sound of firecrackers somewhere down the street. These weren’t the usual bricks; they just went on and on and on, not unlike the grand finale in a fireworks display. The gunpowder and burning red paper wrapping created such an acrid, grey-black billow of smoke, it looked like a building was on fire. I had to get down there and check it out.
We left the restaurant and slowly made our way down the street. Once we got to the scene that I spied from the restaurant window, it was evident to me that this was the place everyone wanted to be. I got to see what was causing the firestorm: actual long belts of firecrackers wrapped around a sawhorse. Wanting to get some shots of them, I muscled my way to the front of the crowd. The lion did his dance and the offerings were made, and then the works were lit. Wow. What a racket. I mean WOW. I got a good amount of shots while getting blasted with firecracker shrapnel…and then the second wave of works came. I don’t know how they differed in construction from the first wave, but the explosions were so rapid-fire and percussive, my ears started to itch and I had to run away. Mind you, I was laughing the whole time, but it got scary! All of Chinatown was fairly loud yesterday, so I didn’t realize how beaten up my eardrums were until I got in the car. Then came the obligatory “eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!”. Today it feels like I have water in my right ear. Fantastic.To summarize, the highlights:
1. The people were just too cool .2 . Buddha’s Delight has the best Chinese food I’ve ever eaten.
3. The day was all about fireworks (illegal in this state), and even as mobbed as the streets were, I could count on one hand how many cops I saw.
4. A guy about 70 years old said to me “it’s not very often I see someone using a camera older than mine." I was using a ’73 Nikon FTn.
Oh, and one other thing. I got to sample a burrito from No Problemo in New Bedford on Saturday. Sweet Fancy Moses was it magnificient.
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