Thursday, January 26, 2006
happy chinese new year!
statutory memorandum was getting too boring. brain cells were rapidly deteriorating. hence, i took a night off from work and went out for dinner. and thereon to chinatown.now, in all honesty, while i have been to chinatown before, i've never, not in my entire 21 years of life, ever been there during the chinese new year period. reason being, i've always decided it was way too crowded, and there wouldn't be anything worth seeing. well. i was wrong on both counts tonight (thursday seems too early for the CNY crowd to set in, so it was only reasonably crowded, and there's a host of amusing stuff to entertain)
for example, a pack of 100 sparklers costs 5 bucks. a box of peanut cake CNY goodies costs 1. (get the picture?) not to mention those rather charming vendors and their endless sales pitches (don't they ever lose their voices?) well, i saw 3 different stalls selling a ladle specially calculated to scoop out only oil (i suspect the scooping method works better than the special filter of the ladle, but...) and a stall selling instant-freeze ice cream (although i stood there for 5 minutes watching a highly remarkable performance where the vendor vigorously shook a large tray immersed in ice-cold water, within which the ice cream sticks were placed, and wondered at my poor grasp of chemistry, such that kinetic energy from the vendor can be transferred into an endothermic reaction to quick-freeze the ice cream. well, after 5 minutes the ice cream was still unfrozen and i got bored, so i can't tell you how the performance ended...) and some vendor selling prawn paste cookies (it really puts me in mind of prawn rolls somehow), amidst many other wondrous things.
or maybe i was just bored of doing work. but the company was great. and i did bump into my understudy. (who was doing some obscure SMU assignment involving taking photos of chinatown for some creative thinking module...) but. i still haven't eaten my prawn rolls yet.
wen was dreaming at 11:23 PM