I don't stay out late

As last year, the local mall held a Chinese New Year celebration, on the Saturday near but not actually on the holiday for more convenient scheduling. Last year's was packed despite the latest in a series of heavy snowfalls of a snowfall-crazy winter. This winter's been less snowfall-crazy (though somehow we've gotten at least 32 inches, says the local news; I'd have guessed at most half that), and had clear skies and dry roads, so the event was even more packed. Worse, the event had lost its spot at the end of the food court. That bungee-trampoline thing where you jump on an airbag, and elastic pulleys make you bound up high, took the spot it had last year. The event was squeezed between that and the Farmer's Market, which the mall hosts twice a month during the colder seasons.

They had a warmup act, which as you'd might expect were a pair of folk singers doing jazz standards. The two explained their presence by saying that only a third of the band had been able to make it to the mall today because they'd been celebrating the new year. I have always admired explanations that don't actually explain anything. (And that's assuming they weren't putting us on.)

But the important thing was that they had not just two lions dancing, but also a proper lion, maybe forty feet long. The parade started out down one of the Younkers' wings of the mall and turned back around, allowing one of the lions to scare some of the kids who were also in the parade and cultural show. The parade wound thorough the mall, so by anticipating the course we were able to see the whole thing from a couple of perspectives, and run back around to see the whole thing over again. The lion dancers were really into it this year, leaping around the mall and jumping out at people, including later in the parade at bunny_hugger. That incident wrecked her chance of getting a nice clear photo of the lion, but it did produce this great blurred action shot of the lion in mid-pounce, which I think's a good tradeoff.

Since we went prowling around the mall watching the parade, we had to keep going farther and farther back to find seats, ultimately not finding them. We were standing in that small corridor between the end of the seats and the start of the Farmer's Market, which --- as the cultural show started --- quietly packed up behind us and disappeared, leaving us with only the recollection that we needed some eggs.

Trivia: In 1869 the Great Eastern laid its third trans-Atlantic cable, connecting the United States and France. Source: How The World Was One: Beyond the Global Village, Arthur C Clarke.

Currently Reading: Before The Mayflower: A History of Black America, Lerone Bennett, Jr.