Mostly about my amusement

Tag: Chinese New Year (page 1 of 1)

Year of the Tiger

Happy Chinese New Year! It’s the year of the Tiger and Sunday was Valentine’s Day too. What a dilemma: do you pay attention to the New Year or to the made up Hallmark holiday? That was solved in seconds and we went to celebrate the New Year.

This has been a busy weekend. On Friday I met up with some old friends who I have not seen for a while. That was great fun and I spent more time catching up and only took a handful of photos. We ate at a place on Bowery Street called Kens Asian Taste.

Saturday we headed to Flushing for errands and to meet up with the in-laws. We drove to Flushing and I thought it was bad. Sunday I would see what a bad driving day is in Chinatown. In the late afternoon we headed over to my brother-in-law’s place and had a great dinner.  You know the family get together that everyone crowds around the dinner table? It was like that and we all had a good time. The only down side was that I forgot to bring my camera and Vonage box. Every year the in-laws call China and the Vonage box would have been useful: China is one on the unlimited calling to countries.

Sunday was the day we all headed to Chinatown. Instead of driving we took the LIRR to Penn station and then the IRT. Good thing we did; the place was a car disaster area.

Lot's of people in Chinatown

Afterward we walked around looking for a place to eat. We ended up going to Hester Street, down to Elizabeth Street and Canal Street, and back to Hester Street once again and went to XO Kitchen. The wait for the table was over an hour. That’s not too bad since over at Gum Fung people said they were not letting any new customer in. They stopped handing out numbers.

Next stop was the Empire State Building. We had heard that they had some sort of Chinese New Year display and wanted to see it.

It was a little disappointing. It was Valentine’s Day also, so after relaxing for a few minutes we all headed home.

Chinese New Year Parade

happy-lunar-new-year

Since last week we were planning on taking the kids to the Flushing Chinese New Year’s parade today. This morning we got to the parking lot on Union Street before 9 AM and we were the first into the restaurant. The parade started at 11 AM so we were waiting for about an hour for the parade to start.

Except for it getting really cold, it was a good parade (with some funny moments).  You can see the Flickr set here. The kids had a great time.

Year of the Pig

Happy New Year to all!

Yesterday we went to Flushing to take the kids to see the dentist and have an early dinner with the family.

It was not a smooth ride. That was not a big surprise, it was Chinese new Year’s Eve after all. Lily’s brother called to give us a heads up; he could not get near Flushing. Main Street and College Point were not moving at all. So we came across Northern Boulevard hoping to turn south on Union Street. No joy there, the police closed Union in that direction.

We had to make a u-turn on Northern, drive to Parson’s, drive down to Roosevelt, just to turn up on Union Street. The graphic is close and does not reflect the joy of driving with so many other happy drivers.

Flushing Traffic on New Years Eve

The good news is that there were lots of parking spots since hardly anyone could get there. The bad news is we needed to be on the other side of town. Good exercise for everyone. It was so crowded on the street that I put my 36lb daughter on my shoulders.

One walk to the dentist, some shopping (my favorite hobby shop went out of business 🙁 ). Afterwards we had dinner near where we parked. It was all good.