Today was the day when the Chinese celebrations were held. There wasn't much to do since it was the first time they'd done it, but, nevertheless quite cool! And, on top of that, a very important person came in to experience the tradition! Despite that some things were taken off schedule, everything went to plan. It shouldn't really have been on the last day of the half-term holiday, but oh well. Or, maybe it was good that it was held when it was.

It all started at around 1330 when we were outside the Palace Theatre. Yep, the spelling 'theatre' isn't in my computer's dictionary... I'll leave it like that. The opening ceremony was a bit of background info on the occurring of the whole celebration, and who is responsible for it all to happen. We got in about ten minutes later.

We had a bit of a free roam  until we were invited to have some lunch. Since we were only allowed in the main lobby and foyer areas, there wasn't much space to sit around, so we took advantage of the stairs when we got chance and claimed a couple for ourselves to sit on.

Shortly followed a lion dance in the street. It kind of lived up to its name: street party. A long chain of men were holding poles that controlled a different segment of the lion, but the front man held what could have been described as a giant patterned lollipop or a demented Belisha Beacon. Anyways, it looked cool, and lasted about 10 minutes, I can't remember now.

We went to buy some raffle tickets then looked out the window to enjoy the view.

At around 1500, out came the dragon costumes and the dragon dance commenced! It lasted an ultra amount of time and I'd already seen variations on it before at other reunions-stroke-festivals-stroke-parties on the street or at a venue. They didn't at all put me off this dragon dance since they're all different in one or more different ways. One thing I've never seen is a dragon try to eat a cabbage and spit it out - or even lose an eye and kick it around - until today. So, that be more elements of dragon dances I can add to my mental dragon dance element list.

1600. The raffle draw commenced. I couldn't get close enough to see what was going on, so I tried to hear what was going on as well as I could, and peered through the stairs to hear some numbers. We didn't win anything. Oh well, we only spent £5 on tickets, so there's no big loss, and the money raised will probably be spent on next year's party. Just like the annual shipwreck reunion party, the celebrations only run on volunteers and donations.

1630 and it's time to go. It did end early and - yes - events did get missed out. But still we had a great time and can't wait for next year's!!

WI and WG, signing out.

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Winer Idimbite was listening to Korn - Children Of The Korn on the famous Windows Media Player during the creation of this blog! <-{-W-}->
via FoxyTunes