Chinese New Year Eve I had dinner at my grandmother’s while Henry had it at his parent’s. My mom disapproves very greatly that we split up, she’d rather we both go to the same place, except she complains I never spend holidays with my own side of the family, if Henry doesn’t mind that we split up, I don’t see what the problem is. I know he has more fun with his siblings than with my sisters and cousins, so it just seems easier to me.
Anyway, Mom, Aunt Diana and Uncle Peter did most of the cooking. We had a lot of food and were very stuffed. What to do after dinner? A nice round of mahjong? The round we played actually lasted 4 1/2 hours! We originally started with Monica, Nora, Uncle Peter and me. You needed a minimum of one point to win the game. Then Uncle Peter got a long distance phone call, so Jen subbed in for him. She won two games in a row, but hated playing, so my Dad took over her spot. Then Nora didn’t want to play anymore, so Uncle Peter was forced back in the game, but in Nora’s seat. I won a decent amount of hands, but I hand one amazing one where I actually picked my own winning piece and my tiles were all one suit, so I had a crazy amount of points, but we capped it at four, so that we don’t run out of chips. I made my mom come over to look at my winning tiles. I think overall Dad won (but Uncle Peter started in that seat).
New Year’s day I walk up bright and early and trek into Flushing for dim sum at Lyndon Place with the Los and Kam. Iris was visiting from LA and Virginia was visiting from Hong Kong. Luckily we planned to have dim sum at 10:30am so we didn’t have a lot of trouble getting a table. We wanted to order Monica a vegetarian noodle dish since most of the dim sum dishes contain meat or seafood, but the don’t start cooking until 11am, except when we tried ordering at 11am, they told us to wait till 11:15am. When we were getting ready to leave, there were lion dancers coming in to entertain the crowd and to get red envelopes from the crowd. It was okay, they didn’t do anything fancy, actually it was kind of lame and disappointing. After the lion dancers left, we took a lot of group photos. I also took a few pictures of the ceiling of Lyndon Place (I was bored) and took a picture of an adorable little boy. During our meal, he actually walked over and stood between me and Iris, until his family came over to claim him.
This year is the year of the pig. Dad and Cora are both pigs, they both even took a picture together with a pig. Ok, not a real pig, but a gold pig.