{"id":57596,"date":"2014-02-18T05:42:16","date_gmt":"2014-02-18T12:42:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wend.ca\/?p=57596"},"modified":"2020-06-21T05:33:34","modified_gmt":"2020-06-21T09:33:34","slug":"lunar-new-year-parade","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wend.ca\/?p=57596","title":{"rendered":"San Francisco’s Lunar Parade — It’s a Visual Treat"},"content":{"rendered":"

San Francisco has the world\u2019s largest Chinese population outside of Asia and after two weeks of Chinese New Year celebrations, the city ushered out the Year of the Snake<\/em> and welcomed the Year of the Horse<\/em> with a spectacular Lunar Parade. This is one of the few night lunar parades left in the world and as luck would have it, we were in town to witness the event. <\/p>\n

The lunar parade in San Francisco concludes New Year celebrations (in some places the grande finale is a Lantern Festival). The event roughly coincides with the first full moon of the lunisolar year; in this case, February 14th.<\/p>\n

Photographers were out in full force looking for eye candy and the parade did not disappoint. The crowd-pleasers were the lions and dragons.<\/p>\n

As the parade progressed the dragons got more elaborate and energetic as they danced around firecrackers. The grand finale was called the “final dragon” by those around me; it’s a 268 foot long Golden Dragon (“Gum Lung”). <\/p>\n

According to the official parade website<\/a>, it takes a team of over 100 men and women from the martial arts group, White Crane to carry this dragon throughout the streets of San Francisco.<\/em> The dragon glowed and came with its own generator, housed in a pickup truck that followed closely behind.<\/p>\n

In all, it was a pretty spectacular event and worth a visit.<\/p>\n