Happy New Year (again!)

Not happy with having a whole year off work, we have also managed to get more than our fair share of New Year celebrations! We arrived in Hanoi (the capital of Vietnam) ready for the Tet celebrations. Tet seems to be the equivalent of Christmas, New Year and your Birthday all rolled into one! The Vietnamese follow the Lunar calendar (like the Chinese) and so New Year is based on this and this year New Year’s Eve was celebrated on Friday 16th February. People here don’t get a year older until the new year has passed, therefore New Year’s day is also everyone’s Birthday! Not surprisingly a week of celebrations follow that involves drinking and feasting, kind of like Christmas.

Anyway enough of the cultural stuff, we were in Hanoi and were lucky enough to spend the night in the center of the celebrations (that were being beamed to TV’s all over Vietnam!). There were acrobats, fireworks, thousands of people and loads of street restaurants for food and drinks. The atmosphere was electric and was added to by the deafening sounds of fire crackers that were lit and just thrown into the crowd – mostly by children! (almost had my toes blown of at one point!). At midnight there were hundreds of thousands of people on the streets all just celebrating, dancing around and shouting! No trouble to be seen - although I’m not sure if the lack of trouble was down to the kind nature of the people or the large sticks and guns the police and army were carrying!!

Suppose I’d better follow the custom here and wish you all ‘Chuc mung nam moi!!’