Hello, dear omnilogy people and Happy New Year to you all!
Well, the new 2016 is here. Yes indeed, the 1-st ones, who meet the New Years are some Pacific islands, New Zealand, Australia, Japan, the 2 Koreas (North Korea and South Korea), China, the Russian far East, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Singapore...
Thank you for the wishes; thanks to all of you, who didn't forget me! It was like a 'party time', when I was in Bulgaria. Here (in China) I had a very calm New Year. We are living in a big city, which is (if you want to compare) something like the American Honolulu in Hawaii (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haikou); you can think of it as a 'Chinese Honolulu' (In fact, I can't find many differences, but I never was in Honolulu, so, it's possible I'm not that exact.) So, Haikou is pretty civilized, with a lot of mainland influence and different foreigners around. Well, we went to the 1-st Nepal restaurant in the city. There were some Chinese, some English-speaking Westerners, some Russians and a man from Pakistan + good food (the most I liked was a naan /https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naan/ with cheese)! Cool, but later when I went to one of the main squares waiting for the fireworks I just saw a crowd that is going/coming back to KFC, Karaoke bars, restaurants, local fast foods... and ONLY 4 Chinese high-students waiting as me for the fireworks. One of them said: "2 minutes to the New Year"... After some minutes I heard "Nothing!"... then a sort of desperate "Happy New Year..." Only a few lights in the sky from a far, far away park area...
The explanation? (If you need.) Well, the most of the Chinese still do prefer the Chinese New Year (Also called "Lunar New Year" and "Spring Festival".) At that time it's (for days) very noisy (there is a kind of fireworks, which is very noisy and it lasts a few minutes, which I dislike. I do prefer the ones, who are like rockets and some others with low noise) and very, very crowded with different kind of celebrations, but it's another topic. Just to mention that the upcoming one will be:
2016, Feb 8 and it will be a '
Monkey' year. That's all.