101th Post Celebration

I just realized last post was the 100th in my blog. Hurray for triviality. This makes today's post the 101st. If most of my writing wasn't utter crap, this could be now made into a book. A book by the name "Scribbles of a Scribbling Scribbler - First full year in Hong Kong". Or something.

Nothing much going on here.

Except I've been getting to know Chi's family lately. Last week Friday we went to dinner with her mom, yesterday with her sister. Honestly, I was terrified at meeting her mom at first, but it was quite ok in the end. I lived to tell the tale. In fact, I am now invited to take part in the family's Chinese New Year celebration --- which means I will meet the whole family from both sides and until most distant cousin and auntie possible. Scary, yet bound to be funny.

I mean, as far as I know, no one in Chi's family really speaks English (or Finnish) except a for a few special cases. So, I'll mostly be relying on Chi to translate everything, and she will definitely have a lot of work on that. As I gather, I am the first gweilo ever to join this celebration. No gweilo-boyfriends before.

Oh, yesterday's dinner was hotpot. Hotpot is a nice concept for dinner and comes with a lot of stuff to eat. Basically what you have is a round table with a kettle in the middle. The kettle is set to boil, with a soup base. Then you're brought whatever you order; usually different kinds of meat, seafood, and vegetables (so the whole bunch) and they key is they're brought in raw. Your job is then to, at your own pace, to throw in the foodstuff and cook them yourself. This will allow you to eat as fast as you want, and converse with your friends and party while at it. It's a really nice social event.

But what food is ordered is another story. Usually I prefer beef, sausages, some vegetables and a small selection of seafood (fish/octopus balls mainly). Of course what I prefer is totally different from whatever the other prefer. Last night's specialties included cows stomach (though I wasn't told from which of the four compartments) that wasn't too bad, and pork intestines that I didn't even dare trying. There was a number of other stuff I wasn't sure what it was since it was minced into balls of random colors and tastes - but those I could eat without complaining.

The bottom line is, with Cantonese foods, that if you can ignore what you're eating, you can eat pretty much anything. Generally the taste isn't too bad - though of course there are stuff that would be better left uncooked, uneaten, and just generally thrown away at earliest possible stage.

Anyway, I don't have much else to write about - and I still go work to do. That said, I will stop now. More to come later.