Happy Chinese New Year!

We went to a Chinese New Year banquet celebration at a family restaurant last night. The food was fabulous and mammoth. Another TomKit eating marathon.

I always save room for the most important meal of the day.

This was something like course number 17, sweet and sour special fish.

Sing-Tao, the restaurant, had just purchased a fancy new black dancing lion suit for the occasion. After dinner, all 250 of us filed outside to watch it ward off bad spirits with firecrackers, mimic drinking beer out of a 5 gallon salad oil drum and make a greedy mess eating a giant plate of salad. Though it was huge fun, Tom and I were both a little traumatized, as the lion looked and acted very just like a naughty Lhaso Apso we once had, Angelina Jolie.

Kitty and the fancy new lion.

Angenlina Jolie as a puppy: demon in a cute suit.

Our friends we went with, Aimee and Sara, are on our pub quiz team. We were all just a little more than shocked when the evening's trivia question sheets were handed out and the rest of our table whipped out their I-phones and started Googling away at the answers. I guess what was worse is that we surrendered to openly cheating, yet we still lost the competition by the one point we missed for the whole evening. It made me want to go up to the table that won and totally accuse them of being cheaters. Not a proud day for my people.

Sara, Aimee, TomKit - Sara won a gift certificate to a new restaurant in town. Happy day!

There was a raffle. A popular door prize in Australia is giant platters of raw meat. You know, hamburger (called "mince" here), pork chops, sausages, etc. That tickled me for some reason. Really? Meats? Mmmm....random!

I cheat at trivia, I copy and paste stock photography. Who AM I?

Apparently, the restaurant had another festival seating the night before, and there was one grand prize that was to be won between the two nights....either Sunday or Monday. A little ten year old boy had the raffle ticket for it, which must have been thrilling for him. When he got up on stage, the family restaurant matriarch who was running the raffle announced that, in fact, he hadn't won, not for sure that is. She would open an envelope and then he would open one. This would tell us if some guy from the night before was the actual winner. It was all very confusing to us. Imagine being a ten year old thinking you're about to become "rich" and following all this. There was a kind of a communal groan of sympathy as the lady announced with her heavy Chinese accent, "And ... you .... are .... NOT .... the winner." The poor kid stood there for a while wondering what to do next, like, "Is this a hoax?".

"And you are NOT a winner!!!"......hum....

2010 is the year of the Tiger, same as 1974, when Tom was born, so he was in a special drawing for a Tiger door prize, which he won! He's not much of a drinker, but how fun is opening a red envelope that validates you're a winner (of a bottle of champagne in this case)?! Now that's more like it.