Happy Chinese New Year!

Tomorrow is the Lunar New Year - a very important feast (like Christmas, or so I'm told) for Chinese people. Rhe same holds true for many other nationalities/ethnicities such as Koreans, Japanese, etc.

Tonight my friend Brendon and I visited some of his Chinese friends who were hosting a New Year's dinner. There was a lot of great food (e.g., dumplings and hot pot), and everyone was really nice. I learned that when dumplings are made for the New Year, they hide a 1 - 3 peanuts inside a few, and the person who eats the dumpling with the peanuts is believed to have good luck. Tonight's entertainment was a charming 15-year-old girl who ate (conservatively) 30 dumplings because she wanted to find the one with the good luck. Of course, this did not stop her from sampling from the wide variety of other dishes, or from eating two slices of chocolate cake! I seriously expected her to throw up or explode! LOL

It was a great evening, and as I said it was a pleasure to meet Brendon's friends and their friends. All but a few of those in attendance were fairly recent Chinese immigrants, and they were all friendly, intelligent, decent people who make me feel very hopeful about Canada's future.