A Brief Lantern Festival Experience

Tonight we went to the Lantern Festival, but we arrived quite late that we only had a limited amount of time to check out all the lanterns! Our parents went out and didn't come home till about 7pm, so we arrived at the Lantern Festival at about 8-9pm.

We parked quite a while away so we had to walk all the way to Albert Park!

When we got there, Princes Street was lined with food and toy stalls, and the road was packed with people! We didn't spend much time there as we went straight into the park to look at the different lanterns.

There were quite a few new lanterns this year, such as the farm animals (which also made noises!).

We were checking out some lanterns and then moved on, when we lost Aonghas! We spent quite a while looking for him and trying to ring him. It didn't help that I ran out of credit to ring him either! We were going to meet him at one point but we ended up moving to another point so it complicated things a bit.

While we were waiting beside the karaoke stage for Aonghas, we briefly met up with the minister's family before they moved on. Aonghas soon caught up with us. It turns out he caught up with an old friend!

I really wanted to sing on the karaoke stage after last doing it a few years ago, but after finding Aonghas, it seemed as though it was too late. I guess I'll have to try again next year.

We caught up with some of our church friends Andrew and Ben and watched some of the performances on the main stage, before they had to go.

Our family decided to try have a look around despite the park being really, really packed before the fireworks were lit. We visited this stand where we each had to answer a question regarding customs and what you can and can't bring into the country, and got a puzzle for answering the question correctly!

It was soon time for fireworks, and we noticed everyone sitting on the bank so we just joined them, assuming they were facing the direction in which the fireworks would be taking off. We bumped into our other church friends Antonia and her family!

We all sat together to watch the fireworks which were quite good, despite the trees slightly blocking our view!

As soon as the fireworks were over, everyone started filing out of the park, which gave us a chance to check out the lanterns a bit more easily before we left too.

(http://youtu.be/qWJ18BTSpDY)

A Large Portion of my Time

I know I said I would post more regularly in my last post, but preparing for this debate tomorrow has taken up a lot of my time and nearly all of my weekend, as they do…
I had to stay up till 2.30am Sunday morning just to get it finished! Originally I was going to base my argument that we do not support human cloning on the fact that it is inhumane. That was until I realised Joon was going to cover it in his! Next I thought I’d cover the evil ways people could use human cloning. Guess what? Joon also covered that too! In the end I decided to prove with statistics that we do NOT in fact support human cloning. Thank goodness everyone was OK with it!

Anyway the weekend turned out to be pretty exciting. It first started off with my first violin lesson in the morning at Lincoln Heights School (or Lincoln Heights Music School). It was there where Nelly, the school co-ordinator told us that they needed a recorder teacher for six little kiddy beginners and asked if any of us wanted to fill the position. My mum put my name forward, and if I’m successful, I’ll be teaching two half hour classes every Saturday morning and will be paid $26/hr which would be pretty good!

Later that day I went with my brothers and my mum to the Chinese Lantern Festival at Albert Park. As expected it was crowded, but nonetheless I still managed to meet up with some of my friends at school like Sarena, Nikki and Ellyce! I was talking to them, and my mum didn’t notice so she kept walking, and when she realised I wasn’t there she started shouting out
“CALUM!!! CAAAAAALLLUUM!!!!”

Another girl who called out to me had an American accent and looked very much like Kimberly, this Eurasian girl (finally someone like me!) who used to be in my class. If it was in fact her, than I could be considered lucky to be able to have met up with her again, no matter how brief it was!

The festival concluded with a performance by Beijing Opera performers on stilts doing summersaults, back flips and all these other dazzling moves. Our dad who was working in the city till 11pm picked us up soon after.

Zippo went for her learner’s license (I think) on Saturday, and upon hearing that, it ignited my mum’s anger towards me for continuing to procrastinate in getting mine. She went on about how Zippo was younger than I was, how heaps of young people were all getting their learners license and I was still doing nothing about it. I’m aiming to get it within the next two weeks though! It costs about $80 to sit the test, and you can only get 3 out of 35 questions wrong, so I’ve always been afraid of being the first person to fail this ‘relatively simple’ test! However after I went through all three hundred and something questions the other day, it seemed to me that all you require is basically commonsense!

I had my cello lesson with the infamous Ms Williams. She’s pretty tough and strict because she demands perfection. She’s also in charge of the string ensemble of which the twins and I are members of. Since we had a debate meeting at lunch today, it was my job to break the news to her. Thankfully she took it well and didn’t slaughter me.

The practise debate during lunch was between our debating team (Hyun, Joon and me) and Chen’s team. It turned out to be pretty interesting, but unfortunately there wasn’t enough time for Chen and me to read our speeches.

It does sound as though quite a lot of time and effort is going into this debate, but if we win against a school such as Diocesan tomorrow, it’ll all be worth it!