Chinese New Year Festival in Downtown San Diego

Chinese New Year is a traditional Chinese holiday celebrated at the turn of the Chinese calendar, in 2014, Chinese new year was on January 31st. There are all kinds of Chinese New Year celebration around California during this new year season, since Chinese population have a large percentage in California. Today we went down town to attend the "Chinese New Year Food & Cultural Fair", according to the official San Diego website, this is a event fun-packed with various cultural performance including lion dancers, martial arts demonstrations and acrobatics, children's crafts, lantern parade and a wide variety of Chinese and Asian food booths.

Since we are not very familiar with the roads in downtown, we were kinda lost when we first arrived there. When we were finally parked, it's already about half a hour to eleven. As i just said, we are not very familiar with downtown, we walked passed at least 11 blocks to find where the festival was actually held. But we all enjoyed walking in downtown, the buildings are beautiful, the weather are nice, and it was not crowed, what a wonderful morning to do workout by walking in downtown! This was the first time I actually "walk" in downtown, I got a chance to look closer at different fine stores, cool restaurants, and luxury hotels. Most of the buildings in San Diego are just like buildings in San Francisco, they have the classic "West coast" style design, but some of them also integrated into modern design, such as the San Diego New Central Library, it has really cool urban design. As we were walking through the downtown, I saw a lot of apartments, they looks small but nice, I hope I could live in one of them one day!

America flag!

We can see the coronado bridge from here

Elisa!

The library.

7-ELEVEn!

San Diego Qualcomm Stadium

Old-Fashion Fire Department.

Finally, we arrived where the festival was held. There were many people, but the interesting thing is, about half of them are not Asian. It seems to be a festival held for Americans to experience Chinese New Year, to watch show, and to have fun. There were many vendors there, some were selling Chinese toys, some were selling cloths, and some were selling foods. There was also a show going on on the stage, it was a mixed-culture not-very-Chinese Chinese dance, many young girls were wearing a blue not-really-Chinese clothing and all of them were holding fans. Yeah, that dance was kinda weird to me, but not to boys, Elisa, Jason and Karen, they seem pretty enjoyed watching it! We then walked through some other vendors, but we were not interested in any of them, so we just took some pictures with the Chinese dragon, and decided to have lunch at Cheesecake Factory, again. Although it is another 10 minutes walk, but who cares? It's the best restaurant ever!!!

Kids were dancing

Boys, Jason, Elisa and me in front of the Chinese dragon.

We did not spend lots of time in the Chinese festival, since there were not really many things to do or to watch. We were pretty lucky because we entered Cheesecake Factory without waiting. I ordered "Louisiana chicken" this time, as in previous, it taste fantastic. I was really full after finishing the whole dish, but it is very delicious! I decided to call Cheesecake Factory a must-eat restaurant now, hope it can expand to Taiwan one day.