Pyrotechnics 2010

This year we celebrated New Years in Brownsville again. (In the picture above we are doing our "2010" pose.) We spent a week down there and had lots of fun with family. We missed J down there (she stayed up in Austin), but still managed to have a great time. We started New Years Eve with a nice hot pot. Chinese people love to eat this, especially when it's cold out. There's a big pot of broth simmering on this burner sitting on the table and all around the table are raw or partially cooked pieces of miscellaneous delicious things...shrimp, tofu, fish cake, noodles, spinach, meatballs. It sounds like it would be weird all mixed together, but trust me, it's delicious. It's just this big pot of soup where you can throw in anything you like. Then you take out what you want to eat and dip it in sauce that each person has made for themselves. It consists of raw egg (I know it sounds weird, but it's yummy), soy sauce, Chinese barbeque sauce (sacha sauce), green onions, hot sauce (optional), and maybe a few other things. Anyway, it's definitely a fun way to eat. Elina enjoyed literally throwing her own food into the pot and both kids ate really well that night.

This New Years was definitely all about the fireworks. My cousin, R, decided to go all out this year since we had so much family around. Originally, he spent $1000 on fireworks, but then my dad made him sell some of them to his employees. R wanted to do fireworks for 3 hours straight, but we ended up with 2 hours worth of fireworks instead. I thought R was crazy and kept thinking, "Who would want to be out there for 2 hours??" But actually, it turned out to be super fun! My dad (Ah-Gong), R, B, and 2 more of my cousins were in charge of the fireworks. A dubbed them the "Dream Team." There were some fireworks we could've done without, but for the most part a lot of them were really nice. We learned that it's definitely better not to buy a bunch of the dinky, cheap fireworks and save the money for the nicer, bigger, more expensive fireworks. The dinky ones seemed to have a lot of problems. Some of them flew in the wrong directions and some of them didn't even fly. They were really scary because we weren't sure where they would end up! B said they were all lawsuits waiting to happen.
I have to say that the one firework I can do without is the Saturn. Every time it shoots out something out, there is a high-pitched sound. Here's some video footage of it (to show you how annoying it is)--


And here is one that we enjoyed a lot--


My dad went a little Black Cat crazy though. He LOVES Black Cats and at one point he was just lighting them and tossing them onto the lawn like a robot...one right after the other. Black Cats are a little too loud for me, but they're my dad's favorite.

We had a great night...fireworks, yummy food, and lots of mahjong. We hope everyone has a wonderful 2010!