2/14/2014: Double Holidays

Lantern Day and Valentine's Day fell on the same day this year.

Lantern Festival marks the end of the 2-week Chinese New Year festivities and since it was the new, more interesting of the holidays, we let it dominate the stage.

Our apartment had an activity for kids to decorate their own paper lantern:

 For clarification, those are multicolored horses they painted on the lanterns :)

 

These lanterns have sticks with a dangling light so they can be carried around the street at nightfall (something we didn't exactly do this year due to being sick).

 These horses are also lanterns. Our tutor Amy gave them to the kids to assemble.  The boys liked the changing colors of the LED in the horses' tummies. The one in the middle is Taichung City's special edition for 2014.  We could have waited in line for hours to get a free one. Instead, a friend gave us a nice hook-up. Yay for line avoidance--not that I would have been inclined to wait in line for one anyway!

Here is a map of the park with the grand lantern festival in our city: Wenxin Forest park. Ben and Ryley made it one afternoon for just a bit (traffic was horrendous and they had to park at CostCo and then walk forever to get there). I stayed home with a fevered Julien and then when it was my turn to go there on a date with Ben on its final night, Ben was sick. Sighhh. Next year!

For the International Women's Association, we planned a combo Valentine's Day/Lantern Festival themed luncheon (yes, I do love being on the planning committee :) 

Using a question/answer trivia game about both holidays, we were hooked up with our "Valentine" who we got to know better and then both received small lanterns with a chocolate inside as a gift. 

Here's my Valentine, Jen.

 Check out the lovely Asian outfit on the right!

 Here's the IWAT group (or at least about a 1/3 of them who were in attendance that day)

Below is a pre-Valentine's day dinner with Ben's boss's boss. He's such a funny guy--he decided he'd treat all the expat spouses who helped organize the Micron Christmas party to a nice dinner.  He was joking around how funny it was to to out with all these ladies the night before Valentines Day :)

 This is what I got framed for Valentine's Day.  Seeing as how the Chinese actually invented paper millennia ago, they're had lots of time to perfect their paper cutting art and it's absolutely beautiful! These particular ones have sappy-romantic significance with the characters that are in them: 

 Ben got me a couple incredibly lovely-smelling flower bundles from a street flower lady. Ahhhhh. Our room smelled so nice for almost a week!