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Thursday, February 07, 2008 Happy Chinese New Year!  Thanks to U! for the fabulous drawing, which he sent me as a greeting card (if you're wondering, it's the Year of the Rat). Have a fantastic year, filled with lots of friends, music, and real Chinese food! Labels: holidays ^ Top | 7:29 AM | | | 
Wednesday, July 04, 2007 Fireworks Imagine cramming 1 million people in maybe 15 blocks as close to Chicago's lakefront as possible for a 25-minute minute show and you'll get a good feel for the annual Independence Day fireworks display (which for reasons unknown is held on the 3rd of July rather than the 4th--the display on the 4th lasts half the time). I've never been in such a crowded space in my life. I like fireworks--who doesn't?--but I don't like them enough to navigate crowds of that magnitude. But an hour before I was going to head home from downtown, Jeremy called me to say that he and his friends had staked out a prime piece of real estate a few feet from the lake. "If you want to see the fireworks without being overcrowded, you should come now--we need more people to fill our space." This was at 5pm. The fireworks started at 9:30pm. Apparently there are people who will camp out by the lake starting in the morning. And from a logistical point of view, there's a good reason: taking a bus, it took over an hour to make a trip that would normally take 15 minutes. I was perhaps 20 ft. from Jeremy and company when I gave up--I couldn't see them, and there was literally nowhere to move. Not to the front, not to the right, not to the left. And all around, people's cell phones weren't working very well even though the signal strength was high (too many people for the tower to handle, I guess). I ended up sitting on the grass behind a couple that said they were only a few feet from their family--they'd left to get something to eat, couldn't push their way back, and were sitting on another family's blanket. We ended up sharing drinks and pizza and watching the display in that semi-awkward, friendly companionability of strangers who are half-united by circumstance. When the fireworks were over I found my friends and we decided to walk one stop south on the L, thinking it'd be less crowded. Wrong. It was impossible to even get into the station.* So we walked to the stop a mile and a half from where we'd started--and ended up in the same train as people we knew. For all its size, Chicago can be surprisingly small. * Actually, I was impressed: in the time it took us to walk about a mile, the L went from being so crowded you couldn't step inside the station to nearly empty. Not bad. ^ Top | 1:17 AM | | |
Tuesday, February 20, 2007 Gong Xi Fa Cai Shark's fin soup. Roast duck. The Chinese New Year's Eve reunion dinner is always one of the best meals of the year. It's also usually the only time I can convince my mom to make one of my favorite dishes in the world, shark's fin soup (at $35-60 a bowl in a restaurant, it's easily one of the most expensive gourmet food items you can find). My brother also made the trek back to our parents' house (just over an hour of driving for him, a flight from LA for me) and ended up taking a large portion of food home with him since he was hosting dinner for friends the next day. However, he says he actually did end up cooking most of that meal, not entirely relying on Mom's skills. I stayed in Michigan for the weekend and was able to briefly catch up with some friends, including the newly-engaged Ricke. Apparently I was out of loop, because he proposed to his Irish girlfriend months ago. I'm excited for him. However, it is rather amusing to note that he and his fiancee have only been in the same country for a total of eight days throughout the course of knowing each other. Even more amusing is the fact that one of his brothers also picked up an Irish girlfriend (though he was Ireland for a few months, and thus it's more "normal"). "We had to travel overseas to find women who would put up with us!" Now they just need to get the last brother in on the deal. Nothing like a global romance to breed stories to tell the grandchildren. Labels: holidays ^ Top | 1:55 AM | | |
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