Shanghai Christmas

Christmas and New Year activities in Shanghai - seemed to mostly revolve around eating and drinking as you can see from the photos. Two Christmas meals - one with Sasa's uncle and family on Christmas eve and one on Christmas day with Oliver and Sasa's 's friends JD and Wenwen and
Sasa's school friend Tingting and her husband.

We had not planned for such Christmas feasting, having thought we were getting away from that in China, but since we were last in China there seems to have been a huge rise in interest in Christmas as well as an increase in the number of shops for foreign food, so we found ourselves planning two Christmas meals instead of none. It was hard to know what Sasa's family would like to eat for Christmas, but Uncle likes all things Western, so we had roast chicken and ham and  pizza and Liz even made mince pies. For Christmas day we found a turkey and most of the other works, sprouts, sausages, even roast parsnips. Liz was heroic finding ways to create these two meals from a rather limited kitchen.

For new year Liz and I went to Longhua temple, a Buddhist temple where many people go to pray for good luck in the new year. In spite of it not being the Chinese new year, the local people are happy to take advantage of any possibility for extra good luck. Consequently the new year spirit tends to last from January the 1st right through to the Chinese new year. In any case the Christmas decorations were still in evidence all over the city and likely to stay there until Chinese new year. In the temple there were many amazing gold painted statues of Buddha and other key spiritual figures and important deified ancestors. Believers burned vast quantities of incense and prayed to the four corners of the world and then to their chosen spiritual leaders. There was also a performance area where traditional music and dragon dances were performed. We were spotted by a Chinese group looking into the VIP suite of the Temple and invited to join them for vegetarian noodles provided by the monks and then treated to a prime viewpoint to see in the new year, hear the speeches of local VIPs and see some more dragon dances. We were even interviewed by a lady from Shanghai Daily, a local English language paper (as it turned out we were not quoted in print).

We wish you all a happy new year.

Christmas drinks

And passing round Theo

Christmas Eve with Uncle and family

Cousin and next generation

Uncle helps with the carving

Christmas Day

Worn out (not the only one!)

Christmas Day evening meal

Post Christmas Chinese meal 

Post Christmas Chinese meal

Granny and Grandson

Oliver and family

Temple 'gods'

New Year Worshippers

New years eve in the VIP suite of the Longhua Temple

and VIP view of the New Year speeches