Before I begin, I'd like to wish you all a very
Happy Chinese New Year Week!!! May you live long and prosper and fill your tummies with bowls of pork crackling and leen goh!
On Saturday night, CNY eve, we went out to our local Chinese restuarant where we ate one of those huge family banquet dinners with our cousins and aunts. Like Christmas eve, the Chinese New Year Eve dinner is a massive event on the restaurant calendar so the place was bustling with chatter and laughter with people bellowing toasts to the new year. It was ridiculously crowded-the waiters were hectically squeezing though crowds, running with teapots and bills, glass spoons and plates clattering and breaking here and there; we had a table reservation in the second dinner session that night and expectedly the restaurant was running over schedule leaving tonnes of people huddled outside waiting, more like haggling, for a table.Thankfully my aunt is a heavy tipping yumcha regular so our wait wasn't too long. The food though took forever to come, so long that the woman at the table behind us went beserk and threw a fit at the waiters.Eventually we ate a delicious feast of shark fin soup and king crab and oysters and chicken and noodles and mushrooms and roast pork and tong yuun in a black sesame sweet soup, while listening to B-list Chinese tv celebrities dressed in Chinese Opera getup sing festive songs in piercing voices. On the bright side they gave us red packets with little red new years lollies in them. It was a fun night, filled with food galore- the table was bursting with colour at one point, and it's always good to catch up with relatives even if our table chatter inevitably turns into some heated debate over some trivial matter. What did feel like it was missing this year though was the lion dancing and blaring drums which is always my favourite part (beside the roast piglet).
The next day, New Years Day, we woke up at midday to a scorching Summer day and after lunch drove the hour drive to Bondi to cool off. Sadly, by the time we got there it started pouring, the bus stops were swarmed with people trying to get out of the rain, and I remebered that I'd left all my clothes outside to dry. There were all of about ten people in the water with almost no towels laid out on the beach and as much sand space as we wanted, which is such an unusual sight. We even found a parking spot a few streets from the beach, a miracle compared to our usual spot a good half an hour walk away-around the corner, through a park, up a few hills. We bought fish and chips and a box of calamari and chips. To my mum's sudden distress, she told us that calamari is a New Year no-no- in Chinese it becomes 'Tsao yau yu' which translates to 'getting fired'. But I love calamari rings so I ate them anyway, which is great considering it's only taken me a few months to find my first job. This was however better than last year when I bought a book on New Year's Day- book translates to 'shue' or 'lose' and I did in fact have a pretty unlucky, loserish year. I also really want a new pair of comfy shoes for uni, but I have to wait another 2 weeks because apparently 'shoes' sounds like a sigh in Chinese which is yet another bad omen. I even deterred my friends from buying sale $10 heels just in case. I'm also not allowed to eat fortune cookies- not so much because they carry an omen but because my parents are convinced that putting paper inside them is unhygienic.
Seeing as I didn't want to waste our trip to Bondi I braved the wind and waves with my jacket on until my mum got stung by a blue bottle; so we drove home and ate vegetables and vermicelli, which is a must on New Years Day. Our leen goh, a sweet, jelly like- new years cake very unfortunately turned mouldy so we ate the dragonfruit instead. And so far that's it for my CNY 2013!
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