Happy New Year

Trip Start Oct 22, 2005
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Trip End Ongoing


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Flag of China  ,
Sunday, January 1, 2006

We spent the morning catching up on sleep (you wouldn't believe how tiring this traveling thing is) then booked a train ticket to Beijing with the help of our hotel manager, Jim Beam. He wrote out exactly what we wanted in Chinese which made it way easier than pointing in the phrase book. Heading out to check out town we found the Drum and Bell towers lit up in the town square. They looked beautiful at night. With quite a few hours before midnight we found a restaurant and had some dinner, celebrating with a beer at 9pm the Aussie new year.

We still had a few hours to kill so we did some shopping then headed to the main square to check out the fire works. It was mostly teenagers in the square with thousands of sparklers and rockets. We were given a few and nervously lit them to celebrate but stepped back when things got really heated. At midnight there was absolutely no acknowledgement of the new year except from us as everyone else was too engrossed in trying to blow their fingers and hands off. They probably didn't realize it was time because the big LCD screen in the centre of town that had previously showed the time was turned off before midnight! We left at 12.05 when a rocket was dropped and started shooting into the crowd, thankfully in the opposite direction to us. It was fun but we know why they banned fireworks in Oz.
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