The Year Of The Snake

Chinese New Year doesn't officially start until the 11th of February, but the decorations were going up around Chinatown at Christmas, and the celebrations kicked off yesterday. I missed the first day because I was in a plane, but apparently there was a lot of very loud wannabe karaoke champions bellowing until late in the evening.

There's also an enormous bright yellow snake made out of paper lanterns, running the length of the street. As it's completely silent, I can't say anything bad about it, even though you don't often see enormous bright yellow snakes. It's not like anyone complains that the Year of the Dragon is symbolised by an imaginary animal.

Tonight we went to buy tupperware, because that's the way we celebrate coming home from a foreign country. There's a shop down at the HarbourFront Centre that sells plastic containers of various sizes, and shelves and racks to hold plastic containers of various sizes, and you'd not believe until you go there how many plastic containers could be contained in one place. I feel a bit of a failure that we only brought back two containers of various sizes, when we could have had so much more. Oh well.

We stopped at Marche, the Swiss restaurant on the roof of the mall, and I ate an entire pizza, which was probably a bad thing as I've gained 6 pounds since I went to America, but when we got back I spent half an hour jumping up and down in front of the Xbox, which must have had some sort of compensating effect. After all, I weighed myself and now I'm six and a half pounds heavier than before I went to America.

It's all extra muscle, I'm sure.

I'm jet lagged to the point that thought is difficult, but unfortunately not sleepy enough to ignore the massive din from outside. Today it ceased at ten o'clock, but the combination of country & western classics, pounding pounding techno and screeching Cantonese in the same song was all a bit wearing, and I wished I'd stayed at HarbourCentre for longer. They had completely silent Chinese acrobats from Henan province, as well as a variety of plastic food containers of different sizes. I assume they were all snake proof.