<< Like A Dream Yet NOT A DREAM >>: Gong Xi Fatt Chai

30th January 2014

Today is our big day - CHINESE NEW YEAR EVE! Sadly, in this "guai lou" country, this is not a special day to them. The town we are staying now, Alexandra, is a small town with very less Chinese residents. Hence, there is no chinese market here, and therefore we can't sense a tiny bit of CNY ambience throughout the whole month.

This is the first year I celebrate CNY without my family. Here I am, with all my friends from Malaysia, Hong Kong and Taiwan to celebrate our greatest festival of the year!!! We are staying in Alexandra Tourist Park, a park with free barbecue facilities and nice view. Hence, we decided to follow our Taiwan friends' tradition to celebrate Chinese New Year every year - DIY chinese dumpling!!!

Today, tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, and the day after, we still need to work in cherry packhouse, although it is CNY. No holiday.To create some CNY ambience, we brought our mp3 to work place to play some CNY songs through the speaker. This is the first time we have strong feeling towards these CNY songs, as it gives us some warmth and the feeling of HOME. In Malaysia, we usually have no feeling towards the CNY songs as we are too used to it. But here, in this quiet town, all these songs mean so much to us. After we finished packing the round cute cherries, we rushed to New World to buy all the steaks, pork, drumsticks and vegetables needed for our dumpling and barbecue session tonight.

Our beloved friends from Taiwan, Janet and Hui Ying, teach us step by step on how-to-make-the-most-delicious-dumpling in the world.