New Year Excitement builds in HCMC

TET or Lunar New Year is officially the 10th of February this year and the celebrations are well under way!

Phil received a lovely Tet/ Lunar New year card from a group at Uni wishing him all the best for the New year.

AND BELOW

There have also been lots of red envelopes given out to cleaning and gardening staff at RMIT, they took up a collection from the teachers for this.  We are going to give our workers here at the apartment a red envelope and of course the usual situation is the children are given red envelopes by their parents and Grandparents.

So with the Lunar New Year celebrations comes even more decorating than Christmas!  I wouldn't have believed that.  We went into the city last night to have a look at the flower display that totally fills the street and there were wall to wall people.  Everyone comes in to have a look and have pictures taken but we couldn't help being amused at the poses?  We have done some to show you what we mean.

So this is half of the street of flowers, same length the other way. Thousands of people, we decided around 200,000?

We got to hang out with some friends and view the festivities from their balcony which was nice.

                                   This is just one of these such poses, our friends Elizabeth and Vicki.

Yet another one by us, pointing to the beautiful flowers or leaning on the baskets.

Phil got a bit scared of the big snakes? It's the year of the snake, 2013.

Here we are again with one of the standard poses framing the specific item?  

The security guards working really hard?

Walking through the crowds, it looked like Hoi An in this area with all of the silk lanterns.

There was an area that had each of the different animal symbols for the years, this was for the year of the rat.

                                    Had to take this one????my favourite weird pose? What is that?

They dropped a boat in the middle of the display, waterfalls, small lakes and rice paddies, amazing.

This video has the view from one end to the other just to see the scale of the display.  This is usually a road, they built everything on top of it...so much work.

This is the traffic trying to get home at the end of the night....was just wall to wall bikes.

During the day we saw these 3 young girls getting their picture taken next to one of the photo opportunity spots, this is a fake tree and it's huge.

Photo spot outside a shop.

                                                     Me making the most of the photo spot!

The streets are decorated, note the yellow flowers above and purple below, they all light up at night making it look absolutely beautiful.

So that is the New year in HCMC and we haven't even had the night of new year yet.  The place is starting to close down, lots of shops are closed and the supermarkets are even closed for 3 days from lunch time Saturday...wouldn't happen in Australia!  Everyone takes the time to visit family and so the break is taken.

Chuc Mung Nam Moi!

(Happy New year in Vietnamese)