New Year's Eve

So we spent New Year's Eve at the park above the mall that we had found. It was really close to our hostel and at the end of the park is the Pearl River and the Canton Tower, the tallest structure in China (pictures in a minute!)

One of the cool things about China is that everything lights up at night! And there are extra lights out for the New Year. I'm going to miss all the lights when they get taken down after the New Year is over. (My camera battery was dying so some of the pictures are from my phone and not as good of quality)

So this park is really long and skinny and as we walked down, each section had a different decoration setup.

The first section had a stream/pond with a bunch of trees and colored lights. (Sorry if it gets picture heavy, and they're not the best night photos all the time...)

Next we were greeted with a large cylinder of orange trees covered with red envelopes.

Yeah, that red stuff is all oranges and
envelopes. Oh, and Canton Tower peaking
out from behind :)

Clever here- it's 2014, the year of the horse :)

The next impressive thing was a plaza full of cherry(?) trees also holding red envelopes. It turns out oranges are just lucky and it's tradition to give people red envelopes filled with money for the New Year. This means there are orange trees and red envelopes everywhere!

Look! It's me doing a classic Asian
picture pose!

Oh, and did I mention the whole park was full of people and vendors selling lots of light up stuff? The longer we were there the more people there were. Turns out we'd picked a pretty good spot to spend New Year's Eve :)

We finally made it up to the river and as close as we could get to the tower. The tower did a light show about every 30 min. and later it added in a water show at the river.

So that strange art in front? It's actually
called the Magic Mushrooms...

Every time we stopped to take a break from all the walking, the next thing we knew we'd become an attraction and people were taking our pictures. At one point a man walked up, said 'What's up?' and then gave us all a piece of cooked meat on a stick that he had apparently bought for us from one of the vendors. There was also a group of Middle Eastern guys that we saw several times through the night. I'm not sure if it was purposeful, but we'd sort of play leap frog with them walking through the park.

We tried to find fireworks somewhere, but were unsuccessful. Apparently China has started banning fireworks in places and it seems that Guangzhou is one of them. We did hear some at one point, we just couldn't see them. Probably because of the haze.

And here's some more pictures of decorations, Canton Tower, and me!