Spending Chinese New Year's Eve in West Spring Secondary

Not sure what to update the blog with, so I suppose I’ll just write what what happened to me today.

Woke up and left home much earlier than usual today since it was the Chinese New Year’s eve. That means that there wasn’t any teaching today and in place, would be a concert followed by a class party. Left the house at about 7 am-ish and I must say, that after going to work much much later, I have to admit that seeing the early morning sunrise is really beautiful. I love to see the early morning fog and dew and the cool soft morning breeze. I should take a picture of the area in the early morning one day. I think that would make a lovely photographic project.

Dozed off in the bus again. It’s such a bad bad bad habit that I’m not too proud of. I wont read in the bus since its bad for the eyes and seeing the same route again makes me so bored that even with kylie on my MP3 player didn’t keep me awake enough. Blame it on the one hour journey. I didn’t have to wait that long at the old location. It used to be a speedy 30 minutes. Even an episode of “60 minutes” is much shorter than that. Fortunately, and amazingly, I guess I’m in sync enough with the bus journey that I always wake up at the right bus stop. I stretched, pressed the buzzer and waited at the exit. I then looked at the bus driver and waved goodbye at him.

Bad move. He thought that I was waving to say that “No, this isn’t my stop” so he continued driving. So I missed a few stops because I got stunned that he didn’t stop at the right bus stop to press the buzzer again.

Lesson learnt

Do not wave at bus drivers until you have safely departed from the bus.

Thus, I reached the school a little late. And pretty much missed the lion dance. But I’ve seen that ceremony for at least 3 times ever since I went to West Spring so it wasn’t such a let down for me.

I plonked my bag at my already horrifyingly barren undecorated table (compared to this)

I proceeded to go to the hall where the concert was held. There were a few number of performances. While I was there the emcee’s were just starting to introduce the dikir barat.

*Dikir barat are a group of singers that sing accordingly to the clapping of their hands and does intricate movement of their hands while sitting down. They are almost always accompanied by a gong and a small drum.

There was this giant chicken that came over. I reckon it was to symbolise the year of the rooster in the chinese zodiac

What made me chuckle out loud was that the chicken was constantly being bullied by the kids. Many were pulling its tail, some where smacking its beak with their hands and you’d see the poor chicken trying desperately to dodge them. Even the teachers were holding the chicken’s arm trying to figure out who it was.

“Hmmm … too skinny cant be so and so”

Here are some pictures of the kids in action

After which, there were a class parties held by some of the students here. Free food is always good 😛

I was just having a little chat with Evannia and congratulated her upon winning the overall class decoration. She said that her classmates pooled up 70 dollars just for the decoration and my eyes almost popped out. Yikes! That was a lot of money for just decorations. But since her classmates chipped in (and there are about 40 people on average per class) it wasn’t so bad I guess.