The year of the Sheep. Or Goat. Or Ram.

It took a while to get all the pictures and video in order, but here it finally is! The Chinese New Year parade of 2015!

The weather was absolutely wonderful, we were both very excited to finally see the Chinatown parade for ourselves, and it was fantastic!

Literally the first thing we saw and heard were bagpipes. For a second we thought this was the St. Patrick's day parade, but no, we were in the right spot!

Someone was a dragon's butt for the entire parade... That's dedication.

To our amazement, there were a lot of sponsored wagons in this parade. We're still not sure if that was an American cultural influence or if this is tradition in Chinese parades, but it was a bit of a culture shock for us either way. We're used to the Dutch "Carnaval" parades, in which most of the participants make fun of politics or current events, local celebrities or just themselves. Commercials or sponsors in these parades are totally unheard of. And serious political campaigning also never occurs.

But I realize our Carnaval is more of a comical event, and the Chinatown parade was to wish everyone a happy new year, so in hindsight it does make sense :) We still needed to get used to it though!

There was one really funny guy at the end of this group, just watch the video!

This dragon was still in training. Very promising!

Definitely one of the cutest, happiest sheep I've ever seen!

More sheeple!

Accidental photobomb?

Tiny sheeple!

I think it's considered lucky to touch a dragon.

Lambert?

Police closed the parade, they looked like they were having fun too, though :)

Even these guys, although they also looked seriously alert. It's good to know they were there :)

Goat shaped figurines were hanging in the trees

Some looked suspiciously piñata-like

But they were getting shot at instead of hit. Strange customs..

The aftermath..

I don't think I'd have done this a year ago, but I mustered up the courage to ask if I could take a picture with this dragonhead. It was awesome!

Hence my "THIS IS AWESOME!"-face. The guy obviously didn't share my enthusiasm

After the parade we went to our favorite dumpling-place to get a bite to eat

Unfortunately, we weren't the only ones with the same idea. This was the line. So we decided to go somewhere else this time

Someplace where we could sit inside to eat our "bapao" rolls. They were tasty too! Man happy ;)

Afterwards we walked past this place. We heard it's famous

Yep, definitely famous

While Bram was taking a lot of photos of the parade (most of the photo's used were Bram's) I was filming everything. It took me pretty long to filter out the boring parts and make a compilation of the good bits. Here's the result, I hope you'll enjoy it!

Oh yeah, another reason why it took so long to finally make this post is that we went away last weekend, to gaze upon one of New York's most famous landmarks. You can read all about that next time!