the long and winding road...

LA fun: Mulan and Lantern Festival
We found ourselves back in Hollywood for Mulan. Its a movie I enjoy more and more each time I see it. G got to wear her super cute Mulan dress from our WDW trip! Yay! The woman who played Mulan was beautiful and very sweet but Georgie noticed that she didn't seem to know the proper warrior stance. Not that G does it perfectly but I guess she thinks she does :-) she's gotten a little lesson each time she's met Mulan.

 See? Warrior stance :-)

 I always think its fun to see how the table decorations represent the theme.

Somehow, and I'm really not sure how, Georgie talked me into getting her another stuffed animal... she loves him though!

The movie ended about noon... what to do? what to do??

I'd read that there was a Lantern Festival going on at the Chinese Amerian Museum. Interestingly, the museum is not in Chinatown but instead just a few blocks away near the end of Olvera Street. We were close by and had no other plans so we decided to check it out.

Wow! I'm so glad that we did! What a great event! They had dozens of craft booths where kids could make kites, lanterns, dragon puppets, brush painting, origami (I'm pretty sure that's not Chinese but whatevs), and even an abacus. What I found interesting is that most of the crafts were pretty complicatedSeriously, Georgie-the-craft-loving-kid was in HEAVEN! They also had some Chinese dance demonstrations and more lion dancing. Oh, and guess who we came across? The Chinatown Queen and Princesses. They actually remembered Georgie from the CNY party the week before which thrilled the heck out of her.

We ended up being there about 4 hrs or so and finally had to leave because Georgie was completely exhausted. Plus, I can only take so much of being in downtown...its uh.... interesting.

Coloring this dragon took Georgie FOREVER! It did turn out well but criminy that kid is persnickity.

 Georgie is a Chinatown princess groupie :-)

This kite was one of the more complicated crafts. It started out with a plain piece of paper which had to be folded and then attached with yarn to crossed straws which required cutting notches into the end of them. Then the butterfly had to be chosen, colored and cut out. These were projects!

 This panda is by far the creepiest looking character I've ever seen.

Georgie's attempt at origami. Pretty good! I had to help her some but she did a pretty good job of keeping up with the instructions.

And finally, the abacus. Other than choosing the bead colors Georgie didn't make this at all. It was SO hard to put together but a pretty neat idea.

Georgie wanted one of these animal balloons in the worst possible way... sure, that was worth $5 :-)