Celebrating China

During the winter break, Chinese celebrate Spring Festival, which is the Chinese New Year, signifying the end of winter and the coming of spring. Spring Festival is China's most important holiday. Luckily, I arrived in Jingzhou early enough to celebrate the last few days of the holiday!
The festivities included carnival games, rides, fireworks, decorative floats and lots of street vendors selling candy and foods.

The Lantern Festival marks the end of Spring Festival. Red Lanterns adorn the streets and buildings:

At night, people make or buy their own paper lanterns upon which they write a wish (similar to our New Year resolutions). Each lantern has a metal clasp with a candle inside that is lit before the lantern is lifted up and sent up into the sky towards the Jade Emperor, the God of Fire, in order to have your wish granted.
My new friends and I bought a lantern that we all shared. We called it the 'Global Lantern,' as it had wishes from America, Britain, China, Korea, Russia and Japan. I wished to speak Mandarin well!
Here we are lighting and lifting our lantern:

Our diverse group and our obvious difficulties with sending our lantern to the sky attracted a crowd:

Unfortunately, our lantern got stuck in a tree, and never ascended to the Jade Emperor....

 Perhaps now I will never learn Chinese :(  .....