In China tonight is New Year’s Eve and I just finished a huge dinner with the family. Because all our domestic staff went home to their families we hired a cook to make us a nice (and very big!) dinner. Among others codfish, shrimps, soup with crab meat and shell fish, beef soup, fried beef, deep fried spicy pork, and many, many kinds of vegetables. Excellent – we should hire this cook full time!

Outside there are a lot of fireworks already, even though it’s not even 9 pm. Scott is not sure whether he likes it or not. He likes the sound but only when we are around. He will go to bed very late and sleep in our bed tonight, otherwise we’ll probably have to run to his room every 15 minutes to calm him down. Elaine doesn’t really care too much about fireworks yet, once she falls asleep she will probably sleep through most of the noise. But at 12 I am quite sure she’ll wake up, from my experience China then turns into a war zone with everybody setting off all the heavy fireworks at once.

We will now visit some friends with Scott so he can play with his Chinese-Italian girlfriend, after that we’ll watch the CCTV New Year Show with my wife’s parents while having Chinese snacks and drinking wine (not Chinese wine – at least not for me). Not sure whether we’ll be making jiaozi (=dumpling) tonight, which is a tradition. For sure I won’t stay up the whole night, that’s a tradition others can follow.

A Happy Year of the Rabbit to all readers!