Friday Five 26-March-2021 #2

These questions are from thefridayfive

1) What spring holiday(s) do you celebrate?
I suppose the Chinese New Year is supposed to be a spring holiday? Though on the western calendar spring seems to start sometime around or near Easter? So are my Chinese New Years considered spring holidays? I suppose I'll consider that a yes.

2) How do you celebrate it?
There's a lot of food and visiting people involved. I mean, if you follow the proper tradition, you have to go visit people at their homes, but as we are not proper Chinese we don't really follow that part of the custom. And when you meet people you have greet them with auspicious greetings like "prosperity and good health!" And whatnot.

3) How was your celebration different in 2020 and/or 2021?
Well, it wasn't much different. I've already mentioned that we never did do the "go visit people at their homes" thing, so when in 2020 the COVID fiasco just started, while other people were complaining about can't go home and visit family, we weren't much affected.

4) What special foods do you make or acquire for your spring holiday?
There's loads of candies and snacks and a vegetarian dish. There's also a lot of food/kitchen waste because in Cantonese there is a saying 年年有餘 which is means "may there be leftovers". The auspicious connotation to that is, you have so much that you have want for nothing, you have a lot of surplus. So that's why in many Chinese banquet dinners they serve you so much that there's always leftovers.

5) Is there special music for your spring holiday?
Oh boy there is, and it's always with annoying cymbals and sharp tones and squeaky voices. Here, have a listen, LOL

Weekend fancy lunch

It's Saturday and I had a fancy lunch.

Also almost got into a car accident. As the joke goes, "it's not my fault!" But this time I am absolutely definitely sure it wasn't my fault. And the car that came crashing was a sodding police car! I was in my lane. I was going straight, following the white continuous line. The bloody marine police car wanted to cut in from my right that idiot! It's a freaking WHITE CONTINUOUS LINE!!!!!!!! Jerk.

I had to swerve and then forced to turn left as well. But because I turned left, I had to make a huge detour to get back to my route to get to the place I wanted to go *rolls eyes*

On happier thoughts....

Well, it was my friend P's birthday a couple days ago, so we treated her to lunch today. I decided to dig out my Pikachu palette for my make up today. Ooooooh very rare do I put eyeshadow nowadays.

Lunch was interesting. They were doing a promo thing with a French jewelry brand Les Nereides Paris, so we got a freebie bracelet with that lunch set. However, despite it being the Ritz Carlton, we received really poor service.

The appetizer came with foam. I hate foam in my food. Coz I find the foam looks like what my dogs usually puke out. So I really dislike foam in my food. Then for the steak, I asked them to cook it "as rare as possible" LOL. It's Asia, if you ask for medium, they will do it well-done for you. If you ask for well-done, they will do an overcooked for you. Asking a rare gives you a medium, so I asked for As Rare As Possible, LOL. At least this they nailed it.

The caramel egg pudding thing was actually good. They also comped us a chocolate cake for my friend's birthday. But we looked around and saw people having this weird green drink and asked about it. Well. It's a Mocktail that's supposed to come before the appetizer.... THEY FORGOT.

And then when we paid, THEY FORGOT again to give us the free gift that we supposedly should get. Meh. Well, we didn't make a fuss. We just sat there and continued chatting until they wanted to turn our table and approached us, and we said "uh, yeah, we're waiting for you to complete our set" and then they remembered the vouchers.

Went to pick up the bracelets, cute little thing but nothing to tell home about... but look at this pair of earrings! Cutesy Dachshunds atop a... globe or whatever. So they managed to up-sell and make me buy something extra LOL.

Uneventful way home, lazed around a bit, then walked the dogs at night and after that played a game of badminton with my friend C. We're starting to get back into the rhythm and we're putting more effort and we are actually chasing the shuttlecock now LOL