Chinese New Year

The past 10 days have been full of different activities and happenings. Let me start with the Chinese New Year (CNY).

I started to celebrate the CNY on the new year's eve (13.2.) raditionally by visiting the CNY fair aka Flower market in the Victoria Park in Causeway Bay with Salla, Sophie, Kenji and Sjoerd. The park was loaded with people and booths selling flowers and also booths selling different tiger themed accessories. The park was so full that you could barely move in the crowd. XD The main idea of visiting the flower market was to turn the luck for yourself for the coming year, so I should be very lucky this year, hhohhoo. :D

Flower market crowded with people in Victoria Park

Kumquat, symbolizes prosperity. These were everywhere, in homes, malls, our Halls etc.

Plum blossom flowers, symbolizes luck and most important luck in some new love ;)

Not sure what these are.. but they look nice, don't they? :D

Grrr, ready for the year of tiger! CNY eve party in Insomnia, LKF after
the flower market. Very good chicken wings in Insomnia btw! ;)

The 1st new year's day was also the Valentine's day this time, but obviously here the CNY day was more important. From this day started my three-day mission of collecting "lai-sii", the red envelopes loaded with money. :D According to the traditions, red envelopes are passed out during the CNY's celebration from married couples or elderly to unmarried juniors and children.

My "lai sii" collection that pretty much covered my travel budget in the Philippines, hhohoo :D

One of the many CNY feasts I had during the few first days of CNY. 8 different dishes was a must since the number 8 sounds like wealth in Chinese. There's chicken, fish, prawns, duck etc.

To summarize my first experience of CNY in Hong Kong, I really liked it here. The idea of getting all family members together to celebrate the CNY and visiting relatives and friends with gifts and wishing them a good and prosperous new year is really nice. And of course it was great fun to be still unmarried and collect "lai sii" (even from people that I didn't really know)! :D

Puerto Galera, Philippines

Just to make a short update: I'm now sitting in the internet cafe in a island called Puerto Galera in the Philippines. I'll give you a more detailed story of how i got here etc. later on when I get back to HK.

In short, I survived to and in Manila for two nights. Then like within two hours in the Wednesday evening we decided that next day (Thu) we'll take a bus and a ferry ride to here, Puerto Galera! Took us like 4-5hours all in all to get here from Manila. :)

Anyway, just wanted to let you know that I'm safe and in one piece, so no worries so far. <3