恭喜发财，万事如意，主里蒙恩，身体健康!

Happy New Year! 
May the Snake be good to you.

The pictures above had been taken from our hutong place last night. We survived all night long fireworks and firecrackers with a kind of a break around 4am. The old year was bombed out. To me it felt like war or at least the extremely noisy soundtrack of it. For the superstitious Chinese it probably was inevitable cleansing the beginning of the New Year as previous years of the snake brought 9/11 (war on American soil that spead through selected countries), 六四 (Tiananmen Square 'incident' ending the flirt with more political freedom), the attack on Pearl Harbor (Japs over Hawaii and a couple hours later in the Philippines), and the Great Depression where the latter brought snakes into the pockets of everyone... 

Again, Happy New Year!

Beijing, February 2013.