Sorry for the huge delay in posting, i have been keeping pretty busy with Chinese new year but should get back into a rhythm now.

here is the start of Sunday, hua and i went to the temple fair at di ton (earth temple). It appears that the temple fairs are the main cultural thing that you can witness during the spring festival. i met with hua and we went jumped in the cab. As we were going there he kept telling me how busy it was, i think he was worried that i would see so many people and take off running and screaming. There were a phenomenal amount of people. Hopefully you can get a feel for that in some of these pictures. The pic above is us entering the temple, it is the year of the dog hence the giant statue of the dog.

this was a vendor who was selling sugar cane raw. They chopped you off a piece with a machete and then you had to gnaw on it to get the sugar out. Looked fun but we had too much to see for me to try this and sit on the sidelines for twenty minutes eating it. Instead i just ate a bunch of candies for Shanghai. i must be getting old though because after about three or four different cakes i was done. i wanted no more sugar. The vendors were cool but it seemed like there were about 20 different vendors and they just repeated themselves all over the fair. Also there was no booths serving the more traditional new years fare (dumplings, rice cakes, eggs, and something i cannot remember)

this was the snake show. Snakes are amazing popular at this temple at least. hua did not seem terribly excited to go to this and i definitely did not want to see people pulling snakes through their nose. This was the beginning of me noticing commonalities at fairs all over. People love a freak show they just consider different things freaky. Although i have to say all this snake shit was pretty freaky to me. To give you an idea of how popular this place was we saw at least six of them throughout the fair.





here is the first view of the fair i got from crossing over the street to get there. This is when i think i would have snapped and run screaming if lots of people were going to be an issue. The funny thing is in the us i rely a lot on my size to get me into places and to block people from running into or around me. It does not help here where the average person is at least a foot shorter than me. i think it only emboldens people to be more aggressive. When hua and i were waiting in line for tickets people kept trying to sneak under my arms to cut in line. And i should clarify, line is a bad word to describe what we were in. a full crush of people yelling and waving money once they got towards the front would be a better way of describing it. Polite does not work here in terms of waiting in line and also getting service in a restaurant (something i will talk about later i am sure). End result size is something of a liability which has taken some getting used to.

this was the first people carrying people devices (there is a better word but i am too lazy to find it). This was also the most interesting, if you look at the crowd it is all younger women. The carriage they are sitting in is a wedding carriage and it gives you good marriage luck to take a ride in it during temple fair, if you ride in it the year of the dog might be the year of your marriage. For my unmarried female audience something to consider if this is what you want. Now you just have to find a carriage and some people willing to drag your ass around in it. There was also an official's carriage. That one was yellow and open, a convertible as hua said.