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Last year, my musical prodigy, Taiwanese, and “Miss Princeton” friend Melissa told me I had to stay away from rabbits.
Since then I’ve loved Chinese New Year and its rules and regulations, as well as the general celebratory cheer that its Presque worldwide parades bring. I’d never been to a Chinese New Year parade before, but thanks to Breezy, I can now cross that off my to-do list.
Paris is now officially cold. Freezing, in fact. So after a lot of on-and-off metro hopping to locate the parade, watching the crowd gather for quite some time, and grabbing some tea at a nearby Quick restaurant, we were only too excited when we finally saw dragons flying down the streets of Paris.
We’d all dressed up in preparation for this day. Well, Breezy dresses up every day, but Sofia (who looked quite a lot like a Russian Babushka doll) had on read pants to represent China, while I had gone ahead and put chopsticks in my hair, and Jaime had used her makeup skills to give me cat eyes.
The parade was a lot of fun! A small crowd gathered around some dancing dragons and furry-headed creatures, which slowly made their way up onto stage surrounded by red lanterns. Drums played; there was music, and it we all had a really good time, despite the cold! At one point, one of the more hilarious things that’s ever happened to me in my life occurred. It’s hard to describe, but I’ve added a picture below in order to clarify (thank you Sofia Lizza for taking these ones- they were much better than my own). See the picture of the little boy who’s sideways in the crowd? He was originally peeking over his mom’s shoulder – she was facing the stage. Next thing we knew, this kid had eased himself sideways, and was now staring at Daph directly.
We didn’t notice for a while, but when we did, we all jumped a bit. He was sideways! Then he started crying, and mom realized her child was sideways and half crying at a bunch of oddly-dressed teenagers.
We rounded off our celebrations by heading to our usual restaurant – a dumpling place up on Belleville, to eat Chinese food and really call it a good, festive day.
Then, it was time to head home and get prepared for the arrival of our first Monday back at NYU Paris.
