Happy Year of the Ox

Well another Chinese New Year has come and gone. I don't know if this was much different from others. I mean we had the typical cold and rainy weather, lots of traffic, and lots of food. We had 90 degree weather before the Chinese New Year, but when the holiday hit, it all of a sudden got cold and rainy. In fact it has rained so much that I haven't even been able to work in my garden. Tomorrow it is supposed to be back to sunny and in the mid 70's. In fact it was so cold we got 60 cm of snow on the mountains above where we live.
The other strange thing is that everyone comes to visit our little city. We must have the best place to live on the island, because every year during the new year when people are supposed to go home they all travel to Hualien. We have so much traffic that it takes 20 minutes to go a kilometer at times. Thus we try not to go out very often in our car.
The other major thing that occurs is that you eat. We had a family meal at Jennifer's house on the New Year's Eve. On New Year's day we went to eat with some of her relatives for lunch and back to her parents house at night. On the next day we ate with more of her relatives that had traveled from Taipei and Taoyuan. The next day we had missionaries over for lunch and then went out with her 3rd sister's family for dinner. They were in town for a couple days and so we went out to nice restaurants almost every meal with them. After they left her 2nd sister came with her family and so we did most of the nice restaurants again. Generally these meals include around 10 dishes and a soup. I tried to pace myself, so hopefully I didn't put on too much weight. However, that might have been difficult, since we ate three batches of chocolate chip cookies as well.
We did do a few things different though. We spent a day at the church playing basketball. We also stayed at a hotel one night and that made it so that we could go swimming and work out in their gym. We also spent some time with her family on a bike ride. I never thought that would happen, but Elizabeth loves biking with me so that was a lot of fun.
Now that it is officially over, we all need to go back to school. So for the next 18 weeks I will be busy before we start our summer vacation.