Chinese New Year Get-Together

Tonight was the first official fellowship night for our Oddfellows youth group, and possibly the two other fellowships at our church. One is a Mandarin speaking high school/uni group, while the other is a Mandarin speaking group for working people.

Since Chinese New Year is coming, we had a combined pot luck dinner together before having a combined fellowship evening so we would be able to get to know people from other fellowships a bit better. Some people also brought some friends along which was cool too!

Our mum cooked chicken nuggets and some noodles for the dinner for us, but I accidentally dropped a few in the car park as I got out of the car! Woops...

There was quite a lot of food for dinner! As usual, we let the women eat first before us guys swarmed in.

I noticed that once again people were sitting with people from their own fellowship, instead of mixing with others! I guess it's just a habit, and you tend to stick to people you're most comfortable with. I admit I was guilty of that too. That's something we'll have to change!

After dinner we went into the auditorium for a bit of worship singing. Each fellowship was in charge of leading one song. Aonghas, Grace and I led 'Lord, I Lift Your Name on High' in between the two other fellowships' songs. We went over to Grace's house the night before to practise, just so we could get it right! We sung it once in Chinese, and then in English. Unfortunately the other fellowships only chose to sing in Chinese, so we had a little trouble singing along, but that's OK, we could hum!

After worship, each of our fellowships got into a line, numbered off into eight mixed groups and then went into the gym for the activity for the night. Each group was given a few random objects, a random setting, a couple random verbs and nouns and given about half an hour to plan a little skit incorporating all of those things.

Our group's setting was an earthquake, with our props being a badminton racquet, a hoola hoop, a teapot and a helmet, and our nouns and verbs being hat, blender, itch (is that a verb?) and punch.

We were quite stumped for a while! We were thinking of incorporating zombies, and then started thinking of doing a Twilight spoof, before settling on our final skit which was a bit random and didn't make much sense! All the other groups were practising hard out while we just sat there thinking!

It was eventually time for each group to present their skit in front of everyone. We had a skit on plane crash survivors stuck on a deserted island in search of toilet paper, a prince who wanted to buy chocolate for his princess, some girls who got chased by haunted trees, some school kids who were riding in a bus dying in a bus crash, and some queen having someone play a piano for her (I think that's what happened?).

As for our skit, it went something like this - we were all in a cooking class learning how to blend from our teacher (Dannie), when an earthquake hit. As we got up, checking that everyone else was OK, we started to get itchy. We all then started feeling like punching each other and we all died. Lemuel, the engineer (with his hat on) then came in to check on our house, found us all dead, and moved on.

And that was it for the night! We then had supper where I had some interesting discussions and a cup of water poured over my head. Good times.

My Dragon

Call it an impulse buy or whatever you want, but I was at PB Tech and saw one of these USB drives, apparently a limited edition Chinese New Year Dragon! Because it's Chinese New Year and well...I'm a dragon...

Here he is!

I know I probably don't even need a USB drive (don't  even ask me where my current one is!), but I couldn't resist!

Now let's just hope I don't lose his body!

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 Chinese New Year on Waitangi Day

It was Waitangi Day today but that was the last thing on people's minds at our church, as we celebrated Chinese New Year!

We had a normal church service, and then had a pot luck (shared) lunch which is something I always look forward to as there's so much food!

After lunch though we had games! Originally when they split everyone up into age groups I thought we would be competing against each other based on age. A lot of my friends were in the 11-18 age group and so I was looking forward to wasting them since I got sent to the >19 age group! They ended up mixing us up into six groups. I was in the green group!

The first game was sort of like charades, where each team was given a Bible story they had to silently act out in front of all the other groups. There were a few weird skits that we couldn't figure out, while ours was Jonah and the whale. I don't think our team won that round though!

The next game was a bit of a relay where pairs of team members had to run to the other side of the gym, carry a balloon without using their hands back to the team and get the word from inside the balloon to form a Bible verse with the first team to complete it the winner.

The final game was more our kind of game. It was newspaper hockey! It got a bit vicious a few times, with some people falling over and others getting whacked! Our team came runner-up so we faced off against red team in the final but...we lost!

After all the fun and games though, we still had a music rehearsal for Gabrielle and Tim's wedding. By then I was really exhausted!

Chinese New Year Festival!

Today was the annual Chinese New Year Festival organised by the Auckland Chinese Community Centre at the ASB Showgrounds, one of the events that make me feel so much more Chinese than usual. 

The weather wasn't the greatest and was a little gloomy when we got there. Fortunately it held up for most of the day before the rain arrived at the end of the day.

When we got there, we couldn't see anyone in the parking lot where the food stalls usually are, and started to wonder if we showed up on the wrong day! It turned out that they had relocated all the food stalls around the corner! There was also a crowd of people gathered around some Chinese yo-yo performances and dragon dance.

We watched for a while before going inside to check out the stalls. I don't think there were as many as last year but there were still plenty to see and heaps of people!

I actually got to catch up with a few pharmacy friends who I hadn't seen since Completion Ceremony in November last year, like Ai Ping, Nick and Stephanie! 

I also caught up with Anzie, a friend I met in the Kiwi Asian Club! She was promoting her performing arts organisation, which also saw her dressed up in a penguin suit!

I did see others from church as well, and also my old high school Chinese teacher Miss Ho, who is now part of the ACCC. It was good catching up with her, and from what she said it sounds like a few of my classmates have continued studying Chinese at uni!

We spent most of the day wandering around checking out the stalls. There were quite a few businesses advertising their products and services, as well as stalls selling food and other things like giant teddy bears. It's funny how everyone would say to me

"Buy one for yourself and one for your girlfriend!"

I'm glad they thought highly enough of me to think I've got one! They probably just wanted to try sell two!

There were some people playing Chinese chess...

The Sky City stand had some computers for people to sign up to their e-newsletter and then gave people a chance to pick a ball out of a bag. If they picked the right ball they got a chance to spin the wheel and win a prize. Hamish and I didn't have such luck, but Aonghas did and got to spin the wheel! He won a $10 voucher at first, but fortunately they ran out of those and so he got to spin again and this time won a $20 voucher to a restaurant at Sky City. I don't know whether he'll be using that though, considering each dish is almost $20!

We also had a go at spinning a lucky wheel at the National Bank stand, but my dad, brothers and I only got a fortune cookie each for our troubles. We all got the same message as well!

There was also a stage with performances, and usually when we get bored we'd just sit around and watch the performances, but this year we didn't really bother. Our dad who got bored of wandering around and shopping sat there and watched some of the performances while we continued to wander around though.

Towards the end of the day we decided to check out the food stalls outside just before it started raining. For some reason they decided to shift the food stalls to a much more narrow area, and so it was quite crowded! Therefore we decided to let our mum go wandering around checking out the food stalls as she knows what's good value for money, and she can also fit into small spaces!

Food was quite expensive but we still managed to afford a few dumplings to eat!

By 4pm the guy started warning stall owners to clear up and for the public to leave as the festival wrapped up. We didn't buy as much this year, but it was still good fun!

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvzwtoPhvFc)

U-Turn

On the night of my birthday (two days ago) I got a phone call from Zippo who was at her friend Kylie's place for a sleepover. I was offered a deal, but I agreed not to disclose it on this website so I won't say anything more about what happened. I did talk to Alison on the phone - yip the girl who I TRIED to kiss last year but missed. It was the first time since that incident that I had made contact with her. I apologised for the whole thing, and thankfully (!!) she said that it was okay and that it was just her friends trying to be stupid. That night too Zippo admitted that she did make me do it, so I now can rest assured that it wasn't my idea!

Yesterday morning I went along with my family to this Chinese New Year Festival at the Auckland Showgrounds. Every year they have heaps of stalls selling food and other cheap things. In previous yeras there has always been some stands selling cheap Western and Asian DVD and VCD movies and music, but this year there wasn't any. I suppose since both Prime Minister Helen Clark and National leader Don Barsh visited, they were all too scared to appear! I saw Phoebe and a few others there. I was going to say hi to her but a second later she had disappeared! No surprise though. The crowds were massive and you had to push your way through just to get anywhere! 

After that we had a Muir Family Reunion…