How apt and wonderful that these two occasions fall on the exact same day. The streets of Shanghai are strangely (and almost eerily) quiet.. largely devoid of the masses that normally throng through every sidewalk and road. I presume that most people have either travelled back to their provinces to do the obligatory family visit, etc, or stayed indoors to do whatever Chinese New Year festivities that they do at home.

Us? We had a fairly uneventful celebration, since we don’t exactly have relatives to visit here. Instead, we wandered all around the streets of Shanghai, taking in the sights and sounds – a brilliant time to do so since there’s a sense of calm in the air, instead of the usual frantic push-and-shove from the hordes of people. We strolled all around, enjoying ourselves and exploring this new city that we now call home.

The night of CNY, we had explosions of fireworks THROUGHOUT THE ENTIRE NIGHT. The sky was all lit up, and I’ve never seen so many fireworks in my entire life. Being right in the middle of the city, we saw the fireworks going off RIGHT OUTSIDE our window, which was pretty bizzare! A very awesome sight.

And as a nod to true blue Aussie-ness, here’s a list of “You know you’re Australian if….” (the ones below are my favourite):
* You understand that the phrase ‘a group of women wearing black thongs’ refers to footwear and may be less alluring than it sounds
* You believe the ‘L’ in the word ‘ Australia ‘ is optional
* You can translate: ‘Dazza and Shazza played Acca Dacca on the way to Maccas’
* You believe it makes perfect sense for a nation to decorate its highways with large fibreglass bananas, prawns and sheep
* You call your best friend ‘a total bastard’ but someone you really, truly despise is just ‘a bit of a bastard’
* You think ‘Woolloomooloo’ is a perfectly reasonable name for a place
* You believe is makes sense for a country to have a $1 coin that’s twice as big as its $2 coin
* You believe that the more you shorten someone’s name the more you like them
* Whatever your linguistic skills, you find yourself able to order takeaway fluently in every Asian language
* You understand that ‘you’ has a plural and that it’s ‘youse’
* When returning home from overseas, you expect to be brutally strip-searched by Customs – just in case you’re trying to sneak in fruit
* You understand that all train timetables are works of fiction
* You find yourself ignorant of nearly all the facts deemed essential in the government’s new test for migrants.
* You start using words like “reckon” and call people “mate”.
* You stop greeting people with “hello” and go straight to the “how ya doin’ ?”
* You don’t know what’s in a meat pie, and you don’t care.
* You suck your coffee through a Tim Tam.
* You use the phrase, “no worries” at least once a day.
* You constantly shorten words to “brekkie”, “arvo” and “barbie”

Awesome grog from our agencies, gifts for CNY