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Thursday, February 22, 2007

CNY away from home in Denmark!!

17-19 Feb 07
新年快乐！

This was my first time I spent CNY away from home. I didn't particularly feel very empty or homesick, probably its cos in the past recent years this festival has become more of a routine than a erm festival. But I do miss not being able to have a valid excuse to shop for many many new clothes and shoes! and I particularly miss not being in my family photos. I'm so used to seeing the full family photo and I seriously yearn to be with my folks! 4 more mths! Ironically, the rest of the Singapore gang felt the absence of the 'irritating' CNY festive songs. I guess being away from home in Singapore indeed made us realise many things that we take for granted! For example the reunion dinner. This is our first time preparing our own reunion dinner and we all felt a great sense of achievement!! We cooked sweet and sour chicken, curry chicken (curry sauce all the way from SG), potato wedges and wanton soup! We had reunion dinner together with the other HK and China students!

Everyone's busy preparing for reunion dinner!


Although it may not look like there's a spread like the reunion dinner we have back at home.. But it was our first attempt to cook something Singaporean. All the sauces we brought from Singapore are priceless, so we gotta conserve! Pk and I still have some chilli sauces, curry and bak kut teh spices! :) maybe we shall cook something nice again next month!



We went to a shop named "Chinatown" in Copenhagen on the eve of CNY. At first we thought it is a misnomer or We heard that we can get many asian ingredients there but alas, we did not manage to get any cos it closed early (cos it was CNY eve.. how can we forget that! Blame it on the lack of festive cheer in Copenhagen). But we managed to get the wanton skins, coconut milk from nearby asian shops! We'll be back in "Chinatown" to get the stuff again!

And while walking along downtown Copenhagen, we each bought a take-away lunch box at Beijing Lou for 30 Kr or slightly less than 10 SGD. It was just fried shrimps and chicken/fish with fried noodles/rice. But we were all delirious and happy like small kids who are eating their Happy Meals! Oh man.. little do we realise we miss Chinese/Singaporean food so much. But boy it was damn satisfying and we all gobbled it down while walking!

Seems like CNY so far in Copenhagen is all about good food. YES absolutely! On the first day of CNY, we had a container B dinner. Our container has an unusually skewed percentage of Chinese gals. 6 out of 9 are Chinese! So we had a container dinner cum CNY feast. We squeezed 18 pple in our little kitchen and we treated our ang moh friends some chinese dishes! Like Ba Bao Fan, Nian Gao, Spring rolls, Samosa, Tang Yuan, White fungus with red dates soup, steamed fish and Claudia even gave every guest a red packet, with CNY wishes written inside. It was great! :)

Yet on the 2nd day of CNY, I threw another party for my friends whom I've met from Intro week! The dishes I prepared were no different from those we prepared for reunion dinner, cos of limited ingredients and erm limited recipes and culinary experience. I overestimated myself and thought it was manageable to prepare dinner for 10 pple! In the end, rl, yip and pk helped me out in a huge way! I couldn't have made it without u all! :) Boy I was quite paisei, cos the dinner was for my friends but in the end they had to helped me out. Thanks!! I really owe u guys another treat! Thanks guys!!! :) Maybe the next time I can single-handedly prepare, since got few pple. But then again, I shan't overestimate myself! rahaha

In view of the large number of pple, I decided to prepare baked pasta as the staple, together with sweet and sour chicken and wanton soup (again! haha) My fears were unfounded, cos I seriously thought the food would not be enough. But the food was too much, according to my friends. But to my delight, they love the sweet and sour chicken and the gals wanted to learn the dish from me! They don't really like the wantons but they were fascinated with the dish and were curious of the wanton skins and what's inside. But the dinner was great and I'm really happy to let my friends try some Chinese food prepared by myself!


Love u gals (Edita, Marina, Emel) Became an unwritten rule that the rest of the gals will help wash the dishes whenever one of us host a dinner. I was the last one (from this group) to hold a dinner! Better late than never!

In the end, Marina started this Thank You card written on pages ripped off from her notebook. I was quite touched and felt so loved! Most of them wrote in their own language, like Spainish, Turkish and Bulgarian, I couldn't read but I'm sure they say good things! ha! Then ErKan started this acronym thing with my name. He intended to write good qualities/characteristics for my name, but he was stuck at the first letter 'Z'! And it became an acronym using animals cos according to him its easier. So my name stands for Zebra, Horse, Ape, Nutria, Giraffe, Elephant, Rabbit. They had no idea wad Nutria is, cos someone (I forgot who) claimed that its an animal in his own language. Albert (from Spain) followed suit but used country/city names instead. My name stands for.. Zimbawe, Helsinki, Ankara, New York, Geneva, Espania, Rio de Janerio. Thanks man... haha it was nonsense but hilarious!

This is not the end of our CNY feasts! When pk's sister, Minling comes from downtown Copenhagen to visit us Countryside folks, we shall have another round of Singapore food (hopefullY!) and we still gotta Lo Hei on the 7th day and make tang yuan on the 15th day which is Yuan Xiao! yeay! something to look foward to amidst all the project deadlines...

Add colours to your life!!
11:15 PM