Gong Xi Fa Chi - Happy Chinese New Year!

At Christmas time in the States, the malls fill with Santa Clause. In Malaysia, for Chinese New Year the malls fill with...

Lucky Money Cat! Wearing a jade necklace with beads as big as your head!  This is a photo of the main courtyard at one of the malls nearby, and as we walked through this weekend they had a number of forms of entertainment on the stage: martial arts demonstrations, groups of people singing Chinese songs, children playing games and at one point as we walked by this main stage I heard a group singing and realized that although the words were in Chinese,  the tune was Jingle Bells. Toto...The Mall has advertised this event as "The Celebration of Paws-perity". In some of the side corridors of the mall are smaller versions of Lucky Money Cat and almost every one had someone standing in front of him, having their picture taken. And they were locals.

Chinese New Year actually begins on February 14th this year, with the celebration lasting 15 days so as time goes by I hope to learn more about it and perhaps have our own celebration. I will keep you posted. In the meantime our crazy neighbors down the street have already started in with the fireworks. It could be a long three weeks!

Last night we went to the wedding reception for one of Heinz's co-workers. It is apparently a universal custom in this day and age to have professional portraits of the happy couple done to accompany the engagement announcement and Heinz shared with me the one that was circulated at their office. One expects there to be a scenic background or location but we just had to chuckle over the choice in this one. Appreantly, he had admitted to Heinz, the couple like sheep so they had a number of them photoshopped into the background, which was a green field. And I have to say it looked like they had used the same sheep over and over, just reversed in some cases.

Another of Heinz's coworkers had explained some of the customs and had shared with him the story of a friend of his who had had to pay the "bride price", which is often based on the salary of the groom. Apparently the father of his fiance had done a calculation of all the money he had spent on his daughter up to that point and presented the groom with the bill. Apparently the friend had great earning potential so the father had no qualms about presenting quite a hefty bill as the Bride price. My understanding is that the groom paid. No word on how the marriage is doing today.

Regarding the actual wedding, the groom and his new bride have apparently followed the traditional process with the elaborate rituals of the tea ceremonies, where they must serve tea to both sets of parents in turn, followed by visitations to many of the relatives on both sides of the family. According to Heinz this coworker has had to take a lot of time off from work to live up to all of these obligations, but that is the norm. Naturally, as these are family oriented ceremonies we were not included but it was very nice of them to extend the invitation to the whole family to attend the main celebration dinner.  We weren't sure what to expect but in many ways the reception was much like any that you might attend in the States, except for the karaoke and the food. The dinner was held in a restaurant to the north of downtown and was quite elaborate, nine courses with the most interesting points naturally being those dishes that arrived at our table with the entire body of the item intact: the 18 inch fish, the duck - placed on the table with the head looking right at me, and less dramatically the prawns. The duck was cut up into pieces but for the fish, everyone simply dug in with their chopsticks. And I have to say that it was actually quite tasty, as long as I could get past the part that my dinner was looking at me. I can hold my own with chopsticks but apparently the waiters felt the need to deliver a knife and fork to the table for me. I'm still not quite sure why my very non-Asian looking husband was not offered the same; perhaps they had watched me juggling Conrad on my lap at one point and Vivi on my lap at another and just decided to have mercy on the poor white woman with the noisy kids.

Throughout the course of the dinner the bride and groom made the rounds of the tables with a bottle of Chivas, making a very boisterous toast with each group.

The toast at the table next to ours.

The bride and a very drunk groom visit our table. Thank goodness I didn't have to drink the Chivas~!

The whitest people at the party

Baby Vivienne in her beautiful silk Chinese dress. And no adventure would be complete without...

the random strangers who wanted their pictures taken with Vivienne. All in all, it was a fun evening.

All I want for Christmas is to go halfway around the world

We’ve been back in KL about a week now and have been plagued by connectivity issues so by the time I get this posted it’s going to seem way out of date, but my computer died again right after my last post and we decided just to take it back to the states and figure out what to do with it there. In the end it made more sense simply to replace it so one of my Christmas presents was a beautiful new laptop! Being the techno-idiot that I am, it is taking me a long time to learn how to maneuver my way around: it has Windows 7. So between that and just the general distractions of being home for the holidays I am now really, really far behind on my blogs! So here I go, trying to catch up…

When we left here in December I was so excited to be heading home, to see Barney, to sleep in my own bed, to see my friends and swim with the team that I wasn’t really even daunted by the prospect of the trip.

6 hours to Seoul were uneventful enough. It’s a beautiful new airport, complete with Subway so we started our assimilation back into American culture with Chicken Bacon Ranch sandwiches and root beer! 14 hours to DC were about what one might expect from a flight of that length, (i.e. miserable) and I will continue to be mystified by how my son seems to get more energetic, the less sleep he has had. How I wish we could trade that quality. One thing I was not prepared for was how completely dehydrated we all got on the flight. My fingertips were cracked and bleeding by the time we made it home and poor Conrad cried about how his lips hurt every time he took a drink of something. Needless to say I will not get on a plane again without an arsenal of hand cream and lip moisturizers!

It’s very interesting to me to see the differences on the same airline between the meals served on flights depending on where they originate. On the flight out of Chicago we had very westernized meals and the infant meal included jars of baby food and bottles of formula. On the flight out of Seoul, the infant meal was hot cereal and fruit juice and each of the 3 meals served to the adults included octopus in some form, mostly on a cold salad. I think the sight of the actual suction cups is the most disturbing for me. The color doesn’t do too much for me either and I am left to wonder: In America they add that red color to those imitation crab legs to make them look like real crab meat; in Asia do they add that purple color into the octopus? I’m not sure which would be more troublesome for me, that the color is real or that the color is fake?

 

We landed in DC to the first real snow storm on the East coast. I kept thinking as I looked at the map, We’re flying close enough to Indiana, can you just open the door and toss us out and save us 5-6 hours of flight time? But we landed in snow and as we waited to board, our layover went from one hour to 2 hours to 3 hours. Finally they announced “Let’s board quickly; small plane, gate check as many items as you can and we’ll get out of here while we’ve got a window for departure.” And this is where the 33 hours of travel and very little sleep caught up with me. “15 minutes to departure” turned into “We’re 6th in line to be de-iced” and then 3 hours on the runway…. And I had gate checked the diaper/food bag. Thank God for small favors that, after bouncing off the walls for the last few hours of the previous flight and in the terminal, Conrad crashed and Vivi, who had boarded with a full belly and a clean diaper, also slept but the longer we sat there I knew it would just be a matter of time before she needed a new diaper and her next bottle. The Attendant was really very sweet about it. She gave me a plastic trash bag and when the time came for a new diaper I tore holes in the corners and stuck Viv’s legs through, lining it with paper towels to try and absorb whatever might need to be absorbed. Just call me MacGuyver. She never did get hungry but in case she did the Attendant had given me some oatmeal that they kept around for the Captain. It was thankfully enough to get us into the Terminal in Indy, and reunited with our bags. If I had not been a. so angry with myself for dropping the ball and putting my poor daughter in that position, and b. so bone-weary tired and desperate to get home and to a bed, I could have seen the humor in it and taken a picture so that we could all get a good laugh about it. And quite honestly I’m still not really laughing about it, wasn’t even sure I could own up to being such a thoughtless traveler in a blog but hey, as the list says “Bad decisions make for good stories”. And maybe our experience will help someone else to remember: no matter how tired you are, no matter how “small” the plane is or how desperate you are to get away quickly, never, ever, EVER check the diaper bag. I mean, come on, what was I THINKING???

But we made it home, 36 hours door to door, and found the house and Barney in better condition than I have kept them these last few years since the kids arrived (maybe Heinz’s Aunt and Uncle would move in with us for good). And Bethli had prepared a wonderful meal for us so I breathed a big sigh: my wish had come true, halfway around the world, I was home for Christmas.