Celebrating Chinese New Year a wee bit too soon

I had the first Chinese New Year (CNY) gathering yesterday. The food was great, the group was fun, the only thing missing was the Chinese New Year ambience. The first thing I noticed when I entered Times Square was that it was still decorated with Christmas decor. Of course there were the individual shops selling red clothes (red is considered a good color by Chinese, it's supposed to bring all the luck), CNY tunes blarring out of one or two shops (the rest were the normal pop and rock English songs) but that was about it. What was worse was that we've been trying to get the 'lo sang' and there weren't anyone selling it yet.

There were also two incidents which really made me feel not Chinese at all. The first one being the shop selling bags. As I walked in, the salesperson started talking to me in Malay language, "Beg ini semua kita yang buat sendiri....". I turned around and she panicked. She went "OOpps..sorry!" Then she started talking in Cantonese which made it worse coz I could understand Malay better. I guess it's my tan, I don't look like the fair maidens from mainland China anymore.

Second, I thought those Chinese shops selling herbal stuff would have the 'lo sang'. I went into the shop and started to speak in Cantonese, asking for 'yee sang' which means that stuff with fish. The shopkeeper did not understand me at all! NOoooo! I repeated it several times and then finally started to ask her 'lo sang'. Finally, after struggling through with the language, she finally told me they don't sell the stuff. Gawd.... I think I fail in being Chinese.



So anyway, the food at Ah Tuan Ee's (nope, it's not me although with an added 'N' on the last name, it's my Chinese name!) was great as usual. We ordered a lot of different stuff and the usual 'perut ikan' (fish stomach but it's actually a dish classified under vegetables because other than the fish stomach, all ingredients were different kinds of vegetables). Let me see if I remember the rest - yoghurt curry, fried chicken with something, 'jiu hu char' (another vegetable dish), towfoo with salted egg and century egg and duck with preserved vegetables soup. We had dessert too - I had the yummy black glutinuous rice porridge ('bee kor moi') and the rest had 'chendol' (jelly like strings and red beans in coconut milk). The only thing bringing me back to the CNY mood were these food and the way I ate till I couldn't fill anything else in my stomach for a few hours. Yeah, only a few hours - blame it on my high metabolisme.

Here's to a happy CNY, hopefully the ambience will come soon.