There are a TON of things to do in our wonderful city to celebrate the Lunar New Year! Frankly, the happenings going on around town are kinda cooler than regular new year’s festivities, if you ask me. Starting downtown at the Music Center, the Chinese song and dance stage show, Shen Yun Chinese New Year Spectacular, will be showing through the 14th. Tickets are at the cheapest $39 but take the Metro and you can save $9 on parking! Garden Grove is having their annual Tet Festival along Westminster Blvd. with dragon dancers, live music, dance performances, rides, and most importantly: food. Lots and lots of delicious, authentic Vietnamese food! From Friday to Sunday, this fest is only $5 a day and you can get more info on their website.

Back to the downtown area, more specifically, Chinatown, there will be an awesome scavenger hunt set up by Out of the Box Events. Teams of 6 will run around Chinatown answering trivia and finding hidden Chinatown secrets! It’s $25 to partake in the event and trust me, it is totally worth the money. These hunts are ridiculously elaborate and incredibly fun! A great way to kick off the new year! (Especially if you win!) Over in Monterey Park, the Chinese New Year Floral Street Fair and Lantern Festival will take place on Saturday, Feb. 20. Another festival with food and flowers, more food, and more flowers. This festival has free entry! More info here.

Oh, there’s more. Chinatown will be quite busy, because on February 20th and 21st, the Golden Dragon Parade will be taking place. Definitely try to take the Metro since parking will be extremely limited with all the streets closed offf! It’s a parade, so it’s free, but you can pay $25 for a grandstand ticket. Finally, even Olvera Street is joining in on the celebration, with the Chinese American Museum Lantern Festival taking place there on Saturday, March 6th. (Seriously, a whole freaking month of celebrations so you won’t miss out!) Lion dancers, acrobatics, music, dance, craft workshops, and more, all free. So yeah— uhh…. the lunar new year is way cool. Plus if you’re lucky, maybe you’ll get a little red envelope filled with hundreds of dollars! I definitely won’t be that lucky.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 9th, 2010 at 6:26 pm and is filed under calendar, food, free, holiday, music, party. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.