Was filial this evening, helping my mum stuff angpows.
Ruyi the cat felt left out.
Okay, don't have shots of dinner (which is a small affair in my family) and our trip to Borders (where we overspent incredibly with my new Borders card and our 40% off voucher, allowing us to get a total of 46% off on roughly $1K of goods [I kid you not]).
Instead, I'll show you shots of our visit to Kuan Yin Thong Hood Cho later that night.
There's actually some bastard yelling out that photography is forbidden on a loudhailer. In English, Mandarin and Hokkien.
Grr! I love the composition for this shot, but my hands are palsied.
Omi tho hood, as my mum says. As soon as we planted our joss sticks in the sand, a team was waiting there to dump them in a vat of water to allow for the next lot of people to pay their respects.
The temple's really smart - they give you free angbaos (not tonight, but other nights) so you're obliged to give them more in donations another day.
Next door the Hindu temple was also doing a brisk business. Lagi fatt choy.
Home again, home again, jiggety-jig.
The temple DID give us these excellent flowers. Fo' free. (We donated, of course, but not proportionately to family income. Don't hate us.) I specifically requested the lotus buds.
This is our altar. See those bronze candlesticks? They're OLD. Families used to borrow them from our family in the kampung cos no-one else had ones as big.
Channel 8 TV special. This one was really weird for me, because it's the Wong Fei Hong song, which is all about some testosteroney definition of what makes a Chinese man, a hao han, and um, well, that's not me.
How did our national festivals all become about racial definition, anyway?
I'm under orders to leave the lights on all night long.
Mum said I could blow out the candles after the hell money burning ceremony, though.
The altar. Heart of the home. G'nite, everybody. Happy Year of the Rat.
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