Lunar Dog

This week I have mostly been enjoying the year of the dog, Gong Xi Fa Cai again. The whole Chinese or Lunar New Year celebration is quite an experience over here, undoubtedly the biggest event in the, well... the Lunar Year. Largely dominated by money, the theme is prosperity, and everything is about wishing good fortune with either cash in red envelopes or oranges as a symbol of wealth. On top of that it is about family reunion dinners and eating and giving money and wishing for money and tossing.
I was a little worried about the tossing, we were invited to a reunion dinner with some friends and I was told we would be tossing for prosperity. So I saved up for the big toss, figuring that if I was required to toss I would make it a good one.
Fortunately it didn’t involve some sort of unhygenic toss off, but as it turns out it is about mixing up a special salad and some raw fish and sauces and stuff and then toss it all in the air while shouting out well wishes largely dominated by things related to making money. The higher the toss and the less the spillage the more prosperous you will be. This has been a long held philosophy of mine so I was right on board.
Everything is dominated by the Chinese New Year; Prosperity this, prosperity that. Pizza Hut didn’t let us down with another spectacular creation hot on the heels of their Christmas effort. Triumph undies were even on board with a special range of Prosperity pants called Prosperity Puppies. I would have thought this was a more appropriate name for a bra, rather than these slightly unusual and uncomfortable looking underpants.
We left our plans for the 4 day weekend a little late so with the slim pickings available ended up in Malaysia at a fairly ordinary resort. The golf was made memorable by some excellent golf cart stunt driving, unusual use of a 5 wood and a couple of holes played barefoot following an incident in a swamp.
Reidy came down with a nasty gastro thingy there so we headed home early, which wasn’t greeted with too much disappointment even though we had to cancel our fishing trip. We had booked it that afternoon and when asked what were likely to catch were told puffer fish and sting ray. Sadly we never managed to hook into some giant puffer fish, although if we had maybe I could have secreted the bottles of wine I brought back in there and I could have avoided paying the duty on bringing back wine I had already taken out the country.
The festivities climaxed with a Lion Dance in the office, it wasn’t in fact a whole bunch of sad country music fans, but yet another prosperous event. I am not entirely sure what this was about, but it involved a couple of people running around under a luminous lion costume chucking food stuffs around. All of this was to the relentless and particularly unrhythmic beating of drums and clanging of symbols. Interesting for about 5 minutes, it soon became an annoying cacophony that I was personally pleased to see the back of.