Reunion

It's the Chinese new year! And what better way to celebrate it than having your whole family gather at one place to stuff themselves with belly-bloating, laxative-imitating, heart attack-inducing food? I know, stuffing ourselves with food without all the above descriptions! Except maybe the bloating, that's unavoidable with Chinese cooking. Well, my family's recipes at least.

1815 hours:
Cousins, aunts, uncles and grandparents are arriving. The aunts arrived first so as to be able to prepare the dishes. Meanwhile the uncles and cousins who were unlucky enough to have mothers or wives who participated in the preparing of dishes lolled around the living room staring at various programmes on the tube. You can't imagine how freakin' hilarious the whole picture looked from my angle. A whole room of people focusing on a black box.

1915 hours:
Everybody's seated at the three tables in the garden. My cousin sister found the camera and started snapping. The dishes have started covering the tables. We had eight or nine courses; I was feeling too nauseous after the third to count. I can't list out all the dishes in order but I know what we had for the first. It was a five-in-one dish. It was all vegetarian and was decorated with tiny cookie-mice on the sides, in honour of the year we're celebrating. The dessert was an ensemble of fruits in a watermelon bowl. But since we had only one watermelon and therefore, only two bowls, so my table got the whole container instead.

2130 hours:
Everyone's cleared the food and've gone to the living room to stare more at the TV. We caught a movie halfway and when it ended, my third aunt brought out something which turned out to be the noise-making tube-things for the Project Superstar concerts. The tubes made annoying metallic sounds when slapped against each other. Everyone fooled around, played cards, board games or just plain chatting.

2315 hours:
Everybody went back home to catch some Zs for the home-visiting, angpau collecting trip which is starting at 7:00AM the next day. Did some cleaning and clearing-up. Mom got started on the broth for the steamboat dinner two or three days later that will officially end the celebrations.

My cousin sister took pictures but there was an error in uploading them and now my camera has problems connecting to the PC so I can't show you all the fun. I'm currently trying to fix this and hopefully I can get the pictures out soon. I'll post them if I succeed.

PS: I posted this late because I just realised I didn't publish it and saved it as a draft instead. Sorry.