It’s Chinese New Year, and we had a great meal with Will and Paula. I cooked an apple crumble to take over, and it was pretty good, but not great. No oven meant that it was an upside down apple crumble, cooked in our one pan. BUT when I served it, I carefully turned it upside down while putting it in the bowl, so it seemed – well normal.

We went home at 11, and started to relax, but at 12 all of the crackers went off, so we went for a walk down the lane to watch. It was interesting to see all the different kinds, and all the little kids playing with things that we would never let children play with in Australia.

Then after a while we turned around and came back home, and continued playing games and reading. At about 12:45 all the crackles stopped, and all the lights went out.

But at 2:05am there was a HUGE bang outside out house. A bunch of bloody drunk young Chinese ‘men’ throwing around some of the noisiest fire works, surely loud enough to wake everyone in the street up. They set off about 10 of these loud bloody things, laughing and dangerously setting them off on the ground, rather than shooting them into the sky, thus making the bang a lot louder as the sound was contained within the rows of buildings on either side of the road.

Some things are great around here, the fireworks were really interesting and wonderful to see. If we had wanted, we could have had our own bag!

But at the same time, some things are not so good. People here can be so amazingly rude, stupid and inconsiderate of anyone but themselves. If we were in Australia a bunch of people would have yelled out the window and told them to “F off”, “Go to Hell”, or some other loud angry disapproving phrase, however no such thing here.

I’m sure the banging will go on and on for the next few days. Day and night, but I home not again at 2am.