bacon in the windows

We spent Chinese New Years Eve seeing who was around. Popular wisdom holds that most of China's population spends some portion of this multi-week holiday stretching the limits of the country’s transportation system, so it only made sense to see who decided to stay behind. 

It turns out we weren't the only ones left in Chengdu. There were also a lot of people who really like fireworks, some chickens not long for this world, and a lady running errands in an outfit that's best quality can only be comfort.

Walking around the neighborhood felt very festive. Red lanterns are hanging in front of every apartment building, including ours. And if your home doesn’t have its lanterns yet you can find them at the grocery store. 

You can also find the Year of the Dragon decorations that are plastered everywhere. 

A lot of shops also have hand-written signs telling you when they’ll be reopening after the holiday, some more carefully scripted than others.

There are orange tents filled to the gills with fireworks on most high-traffic corners. 

These are government sanctioned and manned by multi-generational families who nap on cots behind the merchandise. You can start with small items like sparklers and go as large as four-foot tall boxes packed with industrial strength pyrotechnics.

Each tent has at least one bucket of water and a fire extinguisher out front, so as long as no cars go careening off the road and into the tents, we're all safe and sound. This could be why one of us (guess which one) had to up the ante by purchasing his own batch of fireworks to set off later.

While we were out we also bought a bag of tiny mandarin oranges and a green pepper for Shi-Wen’s turkey chili. This didn’t come from a firework tent, but rather from a fruit shop where I got nipped on the shoe by a small dog. No one else seemed to notice, including the little girl eating oranges out front.

Speaking of food on the street, while walking around we also caught a few glimpses of "la rou" 腊肉 drying in apartment windows, like in the lower right below. "La rou" is cured meat – like bacon – and in Chinese the word for cured meat sounds a lot like the word for the last month of the lunar calendar (i.e. December). This play on words means that home-cured meat has long been eaten in Southern China to celebrate the new year. 

Regardless of this city's magical meat-curing climate I’m still not too keen on eating pork that's been hanging in a neighbor’s window for the last month. Or better yet, off their balcony. (And to think, before I got to Chengdu I thought those racks were for laundry.)