Lantern Festival

The Lantern Festival marks the end of the Spring Festival.  I see that the neighborhood shops are starting to open again.  The neighborhood store, just in the next building, was open for the whole Spring Festival, but the small produce vendor out in front was not.  I missed fresh vegetables.  We needed to go into town to Carrefour (a French supermarket chain) to get produce.  Now the local vegetable monger is open again, as are most of the restaurants up the road.  In fact, it seems that the whole town has been slowly coming back to life since the lunar New Year, and now, hopefully, it will be fully recovered.

We have heard some sort of fireworks every night since the New Year, but it was always much, much more modest than on the night of the New Year.  On the night of the Lantern Festival, there were more again. The fireworks started well before sunset, and the din was considerable into the evening.  But there was no crescendo at midnight, as there was on the New Year.  It was a party on a school night – ending in time to still have a reasonable morning.  The weather was cold and windy, so perhaps there were not as many fireworks as there might have been, but still, there were plenty.  Fireworks are still hard to photograph, and I am still an amateur.  Still, I have attached some pictures.