Happy New Years

We spent New Years with some really wonderful strangers at their apartment and we learned a Spanish tradition:
When the clock strikes midnight, the Spanish eat 12 grapes, one with every toll, to bring good luck for the 12 months ahead.

Apparently there are a lot of Spainards in Beijing, because our host informed us that not only could he not find any grapes left in any of the grocery stores (he told us that he ran into another Spanish ex-pat who gleefully displayed the last bunch of grapes the store had in her hands as she headed off to the register to buy them), neither could his other Spanish guest who lives in a different area of the city. In the end, they did find some grapes, but not enough for everybody, so we ended up with 'designated grape-eaters.' This also meant that over the course of the evening, it was not unusual to hear, 'Were you a grape-eater?'

This whole endeavor was just made more amusing by the fact that we weren't watching the count down on TV or listening to it on the radio so the final countdown consisted of the hostess looking at her wristwatch and saying, '12, 11, 10, are you guys listening? I'm counting. Where were we? 11, 10, 9. Come on, come on! Eat quickly! 10, 9, 8, ' and so on.