Happy New Year! or 新年快樂！

While I was taking a shower, I was looking out the bathroom window in time to see several pickup trucks filled with people and sporting huge orange and green banners go by heading in the direction of the ferry. My immediate thought was, "Hmmm, I wonder what new political party that is." and then promptly forgot about it till Denis came by a little later on asking if we saw the Chinese New Year celebrants go down to Mr. Quinto's place?

I put two and two together and realized  what those trucks were for - Chinese New Year, of course. I had also read earlier today that this year and a few others listed were the year of the tiger. I'm assuming that's a good sign as I was born under the sign of the tiger too.

A little later, Denis, Vivien and I rode our bicycles into town. They had some business to attend to as did I. I needed to visit the "mattress bank" (the guys on the temple steps in the Bible), get a new color printer cartridge, get some vitamins, see about getting my front basket mounted on my bicycle (I had tried but couldn't figure out a way to do it), eggs from Caribbean Chicken, and some bread and jam from New World Market, and probably most important, pay Cody's Social Security, since the 14th (due date) was Sunday.

I split off from Denis and Vivien at what used to be nicknamed Cannon Corners - the intersection of the Northern Highway and 5th Street (I think that's the names). Anyway, I made it on to the Chinese bike shop - Sing's, just around the corner from Cinty's. Right beside the bike shop is a little hole-in-the-wall where a guy has a bicycle repair business. He's a deaf mute, which is probably not PC, but that's what he is. It makes for some interesting communications as he doesn't use American Sign Language (ASL). It seems to be made up on the fly. It works, but it's slow.

Anyway, I had this basket I had had laying around for months as I couldn't figure out how to install it because of the brake and shifter cables getting in the way. I left the bike under his care for a couple of hours and made my way around on foot.

My first stop was the "mattress bank" where they magically turned a check into cash. Then I decided to stroll back through Central Park to Evergreen Pharmacy for a couple month's supply of multi-vitamins. The one's I get have about the same ingredients as Centrum, but are less than half the price - a concern when you're on a
'fixed income' (I love saying that).

Before I got there, I took a slight detour to Family Market where the Chinese New Year's Celebratory Team, along with two fancy dragons, lots of drums and cymbals, and of course, lots of really loud firecrackers were blessing the market for a prosperous new year.

Dragons Leaving Family Market

The Dragons Scare the Evil Spirits Away

Just around the corner from Family Market is the Central Supermarket, so they got in on the blessing action as well.

Central Supermarket Gets a Blessing

Drum, Cymbal and Flag Corps

From Central Supermarket, they went to the Chinese market right beside Evergreen, so I got to tag along in the celebration for a bit.

While they were at that market, I ducked into Evergreen for my vitamins. Leaving there, I popped into the newly blessed Chinese market to buy a small jug of fresh orange juice. Cold and tasty!

I left the New Years crew and made it up to INK Supply. Unfortunately, they were out of the HP color printer cartridge I needed, so I headed back to town.

The celebrants were just in the process of blessing Chon Kong, our favorite place for fried chicken dinners, so I snapped another photo of that.

Chong Kong Blessing

From Chong Kong, I made it back across Central Park and down to Corozal Virtual Office, an Intertubes cafe and computer parts store. They had my cartridge in stock - in fact, they had it in an 'XL' size - four times the size of the regular cartridge in capacity in the same physical size as the regular one. Of course, it cost more, but not four times more anyway.

Oh, yes. On the way down to CVO, I stopped at the cell phone shop across from National Hardware and scored a copy of District 9. Should be fun viewing.

By then it was a couple of minutes to eleven, so I walked back to the bike repair shop, where they were still working on the basket. The repairman had to go buy a file to enlarge the basket holder bit that fits over the gooseneck tube. He also had to put in a larger axle on the front to hold the basket support struts. At about 12:05 PM, I was on my way.

I stopped at New World Market to get some bread, jam, and the eggs. Caribbean Chicken had closed for the lunch hour by the time I rode by. The folks at New World (who are relatives of Mr. Quinto, the former Belize Ambassador to Taiwan) were all excited and waiting by the front door for the New Years celebration team to arrive and bless their store.

I would have like to have stayed and photographed their store blessing, but It was still a ways to go to home and I was getting hungry.

Fu - Good Luck!

Well, I hope you too, have a very prosperous and happy New Year!