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.