Happy Chinese New Year!

I’m a little late for our New Year but thankfully the Chinese New Year was only last weekend so I’m going with that as my timing for this post this year!

Also, I was at a rather good Chinese New Year celebration at Wai Yee Hong supermarket in Bristol to celebrate it so thought I’d share the piccies.

There were lots of different acts on throughout the day and, of course, loads of food stalls. I didn’t get photos of every act but I did get some of the sword fighting and the main event – the Lion dance.

But first, food.

Need a break from the food photos as I’m getting hungry.

In the end it was the gyoza that proved irresistible and, rather unsurprisingly, proved to be delicious – the 15 min wait time did nothing to deter the hungry revellers!

Hidden away inside the rather pretty supermarket was an arts and crafts room so we had a brief nose around before heading back outside

In between rummaging around the food stalls we found ourselves off to one side of the stage just in time for a martial arts demonstrations from Bristol Wutan. My knowledge on the intricacies of the displays is sorely lacking but they were pretty cool regardless! Hopefully the photos convey a bit more of the performance than I can in words..

And with that, it was time for the main event – the Lion dance.

The Lion dance is performed at Wai Yee Hong supermarket every year to bestow good luck and care is taken not to do any sweeping on New Years day to prevent accidentally sweeping the luck away!

To share the luck, offerings of greens are made to the Lions which chew up the vegetables, imbuing them with luck, before spitting the leaves back out.

Despite the Lions best efforts the lucky leaves could only make it so far but the young lad in the last photo looks pleased with his leaf!

More offerings were made to the Lions and a few, more throw-able, sweets were imbued with luck and launched in to the crowd.

Having shared their luck with the crowd, the lions then headed in to the store to spread some good fortune for the coming year.

I rather enjoyed the New Year festivities and will be keeping an eye out for next year but, until then, happy Year of the Rat everyone!

Doug