Happy Chinese New Year! Welcome to the Year of the Boar 4705. We went up to San Francisco this weekend for the Chinese New Year parade. The streets of Chinatown were closed to traffic and booths were set up all over. Some areas of Chinatown were so packed we could hardly move through the crowd. The girls picked out lion puppets at one of the souvenier booths. There wasn't a whole lot of boar merchandise out on the street. It was mostly the same stuff they sell in the stores: watches, wallets, and other junk. The line for the free goodie bag at McDonald's was blocks long. There was another really long line that I never did figure out what it was for. We played in the park across the street from our hotel for a while, and took a break in the hotel room before picking up some take-out and eating it in the bleachers while waiting for the parade.
It was a good parade, but loooooooong - over two hours. Audrey watched the first dragon then slept until the firecrackers accompanying the final dragon woke her up. I can't even count how many lions and dragons we saw. There were a lot of groups of schoolchildren dressed as pigs (year of the boar, you know). The parade started out like all our parades in Plantation, with city officials in convertibles, only these big city folk don't throw candy. Even the mayor, who is in the middle of a scandal for having an affair with his campaign manager's wife, was in the parade. I didn't know if we were supposed to boo, cheer, or heckle. The highlight for us was the float with Yul from Survivor. We cheered loud for him, and Mary yelled, "We saw you win!"
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