Steamboat < 3

Well, I celebrated Chinese New Year a few days ago, and now, I'm already back in college ^_^ On 29th January, I went to a steamboat at my aunt's house. It was more of a housewarming celebration rather than a Chinese New Year celebration, though there were kids playing with firecrackers, the house was mainly decorated with red and people were all passing ang pows (red packets) to the kids.

If I have to be honest, the steamboat was just average. I mean, the food was more than enough for everyone, but it's more of a quality versus quantity thing xD As you can see, or you might not see because of the sucky photo quality, from the pictures above, those are the food we ate.

How do we eat steamboat:
1) The soup is prepared, normally by cooking chicken/pork bones to get the right flavour.
2) Then, the utensils which you put the ingredients in are heated up. In this case, we used the traditional way: coal and fire.
3) Then, you wait for the soup inside the pot to boil for a while before adding the ingredients.
4) You wait.
5) You wait.
6) You wait.
7) When you are about to lose your patience, somebody lifts the cover of the pot and announces that the ingredients are *finally* cooked.
8) So, what are you waiting for? You just take whatever you want from the pot and dig in =D

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that, my aunt also invited a married couple from China. It turns out that they were related under the 'Choong' clan, and their ancestors were brothers (?) I think. At the round table, I was sitting between my father and my mother's brother (uncle, or jiu jiu). On my opposite was a lady related to my mom, her husband and three kids. In the middle of the dinner, the woman from China walked around, passing out ang pows to all the kids. Eventually, she dropped by my table, passed three ang pows to the three kids sitting opposite of me, and walked away.

She walked away! D= I didn't get my ang pow from her T_T Anyway, after thinking about it, I think she might be confused, since my uncle was sitting beside me, and he didn't bring his wife and kids. So, she probably thought I was married to my uncle or something =.=" *shakes fist at uncle*

Still, it turned out to be a good joke, and my parents and I laughed at it for quite some time after the steamboat dinner xD

The moral of this story is, choose carefully who you sit with at a table, especially during Chinese New Year =D

P.S: In the pictures above, I'm not in the photos, because I'm the one taking them ;)