Happy Lunar New Year

Last weekend, timid reader, we travelled up to San Francisco to see the annual Chinese New Year parade, one of the biggest and most spectacular parades on the planet. And almost certainly the longest - but more on that later.

San Francisco’s Chinatown is big - it’s several blocks square, a league apart from Chinatown in London (which is basically two streets) or even New York. The parade route is a couple of miles through downtown SF, taking in the bright lights of Union Square before turning down Kearny St and ending in the heart of Chinatown itself. At a handful of points along the route are what the Americans call bleachers - small stands with benches in them - which the performers pause at and perhaps do something special. Now, it’s $50 or so to sit in the bleachers, so we did the next best thing and stood in the street right next to them.

The parade started in the early evening twilight, with California’s finest riding through. They do look like they’ve just walked off the set of CHiPs, if anyone remembers that.

Now, the diligent amongst you will notice that this picture is time stamped 17:29. The publicity said that the parade would last over two hours; I took that with a pinch of salt. Actually it turned out to be more like three!

For the next 3 hours we were treated to local dignitaries in old cars, Chinese lion dancing, traditional dragons, marching bands from colleges and schools both local and not local, and plenty of other stuff besides. This isn’t quite the stage-managed spectacle of the Lord Mayor’s Show in London, but even if it’s not top notch for quality, you can not argue with the quantity!

Now, we were promised a 200 foot dragon at some point, so we stayed to the bitter end, round about 20:20. I don’t want to say anything rude about the stamina of folks out here, but let’s just say the crowds had thinned out a bit by then.

We couldn’t mistake the big finish, because the dragon’s arrival was heralded by some dude chucking bucket-sized pyrotechnics into the road before it arrived. We were warned to cover our ears!

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/b4ccc2_9f247bcefed84856b7320a48945d02b1/720p/mp4/file.mp4

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/b4ccc2_be92a016968a442d8f5824cf29ffbf94/720p/mp4/file.mp4

The day was finished off with some minor annoyance as a result of the general state of mass transit here; on a weekend evening, mass transit basically means Uber or Lyft. Come back South Western Railway, all is forgiven.

The parade, like many things in the US, was just good innocent fun, with little of the focus on tedious things like organisation or health and safety that you might get in the UK. Another adventure ticked off.