During the last few weeks, there have been many events celebrating the Lunar New Year. It is the year of the rabbit. For the past few years, I’ve gone to Chinatown near downtown Los Angeles to attend the festival and parade. Once again, I did that this year. However, this year’s visit was mostly sightseeing with friends and taking more personal photos rather than attempting to do any coverage of the festivities. Every year that I’ve gone, there was a festival that was put together by local television station KSCI-TV. It was a fairly large festival with food, merchandise, and service booths. There was also a rather large stage featuring entertainment from many Asian countries. The station also puts on a Harvest Moon Festival later in the year and it’s almost the exact same festival. That festival was not there this year. Instead, there was a much smaller festival near the northern end of Chinatown. It was decent, but rather cramped.
This year, KSCI-TV brought their festival to Charles Wilson Park in Torrance and it was held two weeks earlier than the event in Chinatown. This turned out to be very convenient since this was much closer to where I live. During the early part of the day, it wasn’t a very good day for a festival. It was cold, windy, and raining fairly hard. This turned areas of the park into a muddy mess. Featured entertainers were seriously considering canceling their performances because it was too dangerous to perform. Fortunately, the sun came out and the rain stopped in the early afternoon. When the weather improved, the crowds came and it turned out to be a very well-attended event despite the conditions. Fans were very eager to see the headlining acts–Joseph Vincent and Clara C. Both acts seemed to have very loyal followers. I don’t know if this festival has moved to Torrance permanently, but it was nice to have such and event so close to home.
