It is New Years again!  This Thursday is the Lunar New Year celebrated by the China and many other Asian countries as a major holiday.  It is an ancient festival going back to at least 200 BC.  Traditionally it is a time  to honor the "Deities" as well as ancestors.  Recently, I re-visited one of the largest Buddhist temples in Los Angeles as they were beginning to decorate the temple grounds for "New Year."  

The entrance to the Temple is through this first structure:

After entering through this building, you come upon a courtyard with the main temple in the background

Walking across the courtyard to the foot of the stairs and looking back across the courtyard yields this view of the entrance structure:

And, looking at the main temple from the top of the stairs:

Dead center, in black, is an incense burner where I had previously taken this shot:

Did you notice all the Chinese lanterns placed around the buildings in the previous images?  

According to Wikipedia, in "olden times" on the last day of the New Years festival, children would go out at night to the temples carrying paper lanterns to solve riddles written on the larger ornate lanterns.  According to another source, the lanterns symbolize people letting go of their past selves and getting new ones ... not too unlike our New Years Resolutions.

In addition to burning incense, this temple had candles that could be purchased and lit.  As an old alter boy, I'm always struck by the use of incense and candles in the practice of the Buddhist and Catholic religions. Does anyone know why?  

Here's another view of the candle table ... it's been juiced-up a bit by me in the post processing process:

The roof lines of large Asian structures (especially if lined with tiles) are very distinctive and invariably draws a picture or two from my camera. This one got a lot more interesting to me when I "juiced" it up in photoshop:  

A few days later, I visited "Little Saigon", an area in Orange County settled originally by the Vietnamese after the fall of Saigon. The yellow flag shown next to Old Glory is the one used by South Vietnam.  The Vietnamese call the lunar new year "Tet" ... a word that should be familiar to those of us who remember the "Tet Offensive" initiated by the North Vietnamese.

New Years is as big a celebration to the Vietnamese as it is to the Chinese.  Here I've captured a young boy putting away his Lion costume after dancing in a celebration:

And, I manged to capture this child in the midst of a large crowd dressed in traditional looking clothes.  He was one of several young children dressed like this during my brief visit:

One of the great things about Los Angeles is its diversity.  Virtually every culture in the World is represented here in someway...  particularly  the  Asians and,  of course, the Spanish speaking  peoples.

Well, another long entry that's finally come to the end.  By the way, there are lots of other traditions surrounding the Lunar New Years that I only vaguely understand.

As always, I hope you enjoyed it, and I thank you for taking the time to view  it.  

Bye for now,

Adam