The Year of the Snake
Started: 2025-04-08 20:43:38
Submitted: 2025-04-08 21:54:18
Visibility: World-readable
Watching the Chinese New Year Parade
In the middle of February I went to see the Chinese New Year parade in San Francisco celebrating the Year of the Snake. No one else in my family wanted to leave the house to see the parade so I went by myself.
To get up the peninsula and into the city I took Caltrain from San Jose to San Francisco, then caught the T line to its northern terminus in Chinatown. I arrived in Chinatown with enough time to get a snack before the parade, so I found a boba tea shop between the Muni station and the parade route. I punched my order into the kiosk and waited, and only then realized that the long and narrow shop was full of people who had ordered ahead of me and were still waiting for their boba tea and there was only one person working behind the counter slowly working their way through the backlog of orders. It took 45 minutes to make my tea and by the time I got my tea and made it down to Kearny the beginning of the parade had reached my location.
Or at least, some of the parade had reached my location. After a few entries (mostly local political leaders if I recall) the parade stalled for what felt like a long time. I didn't precisely note down the arrival times of every entry in the parade, and when standing and watching a parade on a crowded sidewalk in Chinatown across the street from the plaza in front of the former Bank of America Building, under the watchful eye of the crenellated black granite edifice fading into the sky as the sun set and the sky grew dark, time stretched to make every minute feel much longer. But I have a 30-minute gap in my pictures, and a timestamp indicating that a parade marshal finally walked down the parade route telling us that the parade would be "coming soon, like ten minutes" and finally I saw a slow-moving SUV in the distance, coming languidly in my direction, with an anxious parade marshal trying to speed it up to close the half-hour gap in the parade.
I remembered many of the parade entries from previous years, including UC Davis' marching band, and the marching bands of multiple high schools around the Bay Area (and a couple of middle schools). There were multiple lion dances, vaguely identified as belonging to different organizations, marching down the street carrying their stylized Chinese dragons.
There were multiple elementary schools from around San Francisco in the parade, including Garfield Elementary, which dressed its kids as mahjong tiles.
San Francisco Public Library sent its bookmobile to the parade.
BARTmobile made an appearance in the parade, dressed for the holiday.
Then there were a series of corporate and institutional floats, including SFO advertising itself as the gateway to Asia with non-stop flights.
Several groups throughout the parade had small firecrackers, but the big firecrackers were delivered by a dedicated team that drove up the parade route on an ATV, pulled a string of firecrackers out of fire box mounted to the back of the vehicle, and set them off in the middle of the street.
The last entry in the parade was a lion dance so long that it was equipped with its own tender: a pickup truck with a generator in its bed followed it down the street to provide the power to illuminate the dragon.
This dragon was so long that it couldn't loop back on itself; it could only zig-zag back and forth along the route, sweeping by the spectators on the fences lining the parade route.
The finale swept by and the parade was over, three hours after it had begun.
After the parade I caught BART to the Mission for a late supper, then took a Muni bus to catch Caltrain back to San Jose before driving the rest of the way home. I got to see the Chinese New Year parade to celebrate the lunar new year, one of San Francisco's cultural celebrations.
I took a few more pictures from the parade at Photos on 2025-02-15.
