Said and done! My good friend Joie told me to come over in her center in Johor (South of MAlaysia). She basically does the same thing as I do, only in a place called Sungai Sulog - this is literally a village made up only of one street! But it is 15min away from a reasonably sized city called Batu Pahat. Also, although she has some MAlay students, the majority of her students are Chinese. And they are also very willing to impart their culture with the silly matsallehs that don't know much about anything.
Our party consisted of four (sorry for the language, I'm reading Jane Austen again) - Joie, Sarah (her Italian volunteer), Kayla (an American whose blond hair and blue eyes basically makes her the main attraction around here:)) and myself. And we were truly treated royaly!
We had 3 days that basically consisted of us being moved around from house to house, event to event, tradition to tradition. And in each of these places there would be tons and tons of food and of photo taking (seriously, celebrities had nothing compared to us in those days!).
From the highlights of our celebrations:
- we got to wear pretty red dresses all the time, cause everyone must wear red for good luck!
- we made money! Unlike what I've seen in other cultures, the Chinese New Year celebration seems to be a lot about prosperity, abundance and having a good living. All the rituals go on about it. And single people receive tiny (and quite pretty) red envelopes with money in them. So this is actually the first trip ever that I ended with more money than when I left!
- The Chinese eat a lot!! Like think Romanian dimensions for Christmas! Only that they do that for 15 days...that's how much the CNY celebrations last!
- on this day, the Chinese do not think at all about fire safety! Everyone lights up fireworks at 12 o'clock, but they are of truly impressive size and duration and they are lit exactly above neighbourhood houses and such. One firework even went into someone's house and we were all panicking, but everyone around was just laughing...
- Chinese kids are very cute!
- I learned to play mah jong and I really liked it! It's way smarter and more interesting than what the internet version lets you to believe :)
- we saw lots of posh houses! Some of Joie's students were quite well off so it was super interesting to see this part of Malaysia also. It is very well known here that the Chinese are dominating in terms of economic activities and the weekend definitely reflected that :)
- we karaoked twice! You just cannot get out of it!
- we saw these cool rituals like the lion dance and the dragon dance. Loved the music and the rhythm and the whole atmosphere of the celebration!
- we had good wine and French cheese! What more is there to say?:)
Overall, it was a super super nice weekend. Though at some point it did get a bit tiring - our hosts however were never tired of taking us to yet another event! We even went to one of the Mister's secondary school reunion! 41 years reunion that is!! We ate there some more too(in case anyone was wondering:))
At one point however I did stop enjoying the popularity. At times it felt we were paraded around for being white...I know it might sound stupid but that was not such a nice feeling anymore. Though I am sure everyone meant well. But so you see the extent of the photo shoots happening, here is the evidence:)
