The Chinese New Year came and went on the 28th of January. It is now the year of the rooster.
“But if it’s the year of the rooster,” I asked my teammates, “then why is that decoration of a peacock?”
“Umm… because maybe they’re related but the peacock looks prettier… maybe?” Yan Ming replied.
My Singaporean teammates need to put up with a lot of weird questions like these from the only non-Singaporean on the team.
We also got our usual two mandarins and ang pao or packet of money from our company. For the past two years there has been a single crisp 10 dollar bill inside. The year before that there was $8, because 8 is a lucky number for the Chinese, but I guess it took too much effort to count out four 2 dollar bills and stuff them inside over three hundred packets, so they decided to change it to $10.
Anyway, what’s different about this year is that my ang pao wasn’t in the traditional red color, but in bright purple and pink. My boss purposely gave it to me, she said, because she knows how much I love purple. 😄
Our team also had a “Chinese reunion dinner” on the night before CNY eve. Guohao suggested we have one right before our call with our teammates in Canada. We have another reorg, by the way, and once again we have changed departments.
“Why are we calling it a reunion dinner when we see each other everyday?” I asked.
See what my teammates have to put up with?
We had the dinner at a nearby Chinese restaurant called Yum Cha.
Then today, we had our annual lo hei or prosperity salad toss at the office. I’ve talked about what lo hei is in detail before. Look how pretty everything looks before the toss.
Now look at what a disaster it looks afterwards. Our team has never done a neat lo hei EVER.
In fact it was worse last year, when bits actually ended up on the ceiling! 😅
I took time lapse and slow motion videos of our lo hei yesterday, and thought it looked great. Note to self: take more time lapse videos!
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