When does IKEA become less Swedish?

Living so far away from Europe, you start treating places like IKEA like piece of a home land. The same way as embassy legally is treated as its country, entering IKEA you feel like you travel between places. Usually when I go to IKEA, directly from the entrance I feel like I am in Sweden (kind of).

But last time it was very different. When I came the first thing I saw was a lot of products related to Chinese New Year, read kitchen towels with yellow dragons, hot pot pads and many other things. And the music... Very Chinese... The charming part was people singing and swinging to the rhythm. Both adults and kinds where singing "Happy New Year" when looking at the couches or kitchen furnitures.

It is only one week left to the celebration of the Chinese New Year and we are still struggling with ourselves if we should stay here and try to see how Chinese people celebrate or should we get away from here... Why do we consider leaving China during this time? One reason never ending fireworks... 24h around the clock.

According to the very old tradition New Year has been perceived as a man-eating beast that was afraid of red colour and loud sound. When people realized that they started placing red paper decorations in their windows and put bamboo wod to the fire (old time fireworks). So, the louder it gets the safest it will be in the coming year... And believe me, Chinese simply love fireworks. They do them for any occasion they have; birthday, opening a new shop, buying a new car and so on... And with these "small" occasions they go wild. So with a new year... God help us all... :) They call New Year celebration "Spring Festival". According to lunar calendar the spring starts then.

And strangely enough you can feel in the air spring coming and the birds are sing in the garden from early morning :)