It's the Year of the Sheep (in Vietnamese, "Tet Quy Mui") and we went to celebrate around town.
(Click on a picture to see a larger version)
It's always about family, of course, so we went to see Thuy's step-brother Huey and his family (wife Celine, daughter Hannah and baby Haley). Here we stopped to honor Thuy's step-father's memory too.
Next stop was the big Vietnam Buddhist Center (Chua Viet Nam at 10002 Synott Rd in Sugarland) where there was a massive crowd. But we still managed to run into a friend in the chaos:
That was a bit much for us, so we headed to a smaller venue, the Linh Son Temple in NW Houston (Chua Linh Son, 13506 Anne Louise St., Houston). The dragons are awaiting being blessed by the priests:
If the evil spirits weren't scared away by the firecrackers, they are certainly deaf now!
The show was really quite spectacular. The effort by the dancers was enormous and they would switch in and out without stopping the dance.
The dragons are always hungry for gifts of money!
We found her cousin Thien, who danced the head of the dragon during the dragon dances.
The priests handed out lucky tangerines with lime tree branches and a money packet with a lucky quarter in it.
Thuy prayed for good fortune by shaking a cup with numbered bamboo strips in it until one of the strips jumped out. Two half-moon shaped wooden pieces were then dropped on the floor to see if they landed one-up-one-down to signify that the gods had accepted the numbered request. A correspondingly numbered sheet of paper told us that we would be prosperous in the new year.
It was very quiet in the red firecracker paper-strewn temple courtyard aftwards.
Back home, we honored Stephen's father in this new year.
