The year of the Dragon has started!  Happy New Year!

Being my first Chinese New Years, I was surprised at the energy and excitement around Shanghai.  People get into the holiday mode for a long time here. Its almost 40days where there are people taking vacation time and getting ready to celebrate the new years…

Most interesting was the fact that I was still in Shanghai, when a HUGE number of the population travels all over China to go back home and visit family or go on holiday somewhere.  Shanghai is normally bustling with energy and people.  Its busy enough that other large cities in the world seem to be quiet little places with not a lot of people out and about.

During the new years time (especially the few days surrounding new years day/eve), Shanghai was a ghost town.

Its amazing to walk down the street and not bump into people, go out for a cab and there is one waiting for you, look down the street and not see any cars…  Its quite a striking difference!

Biggest things about new years here, ONE being the fact that most restaurants are closed (and we were open at Osteria), and TWO the unbelievable amount of fireworks that were going off for a consistent 12 hours.  I’ve seen some incredible firework shows in Chicago, Lake Geneva, and other places for the 4th of July.  But this was nuts!  People lighting off some pretty crazy fireworks, sometimes right next to each other and right near cars and buildings.  It was super concentrated.  The street Osteria is on had four fire work “shows” going off at once for about 2 hours.  Helps that we had some Chinese Army guys (with lots of confiscated fireworks, and big ones too), they were going crazy!  It was like WWIII, in festive mode.

Hilarious!

We have decided that Osteria will be a place to go during the time most places are closed for CNY.  We will have very minimal staff, basically only the foreigners, so its a little crazy, but lots of fun.  This year we had a fraction of the staff, and we were hopping.  We were surprised at the amount of calls with people surprised that we were open!

Welcome, Year of the Dragon!