The Farewell Party

I didn't post the past two days because I was busy with this party, one day for shopping and another day for preparing food. Since Icecube and I are leaving, we want to treat our friends here in the classic Chinese way-- throw out a big dinner party. It is way too early to make it a fairwell party since he won't leave until two months later. But all the friends cannot wait.

I am not such a great cook, so I decided to set up two hot pots. This is the easist dinner in the sense of preparation that i can think of. Easy as I said, it still took me four hours to put all the food on the plates before i got them on the table for the hot pots. I had to cut the beef, pork and lamb into really thin slices because hot-pot-ready meat is not availabe in the only Chinese food store here.

We got 14 people. Sitting around two hot pots, with three fans running and the air conditioning set at 60 degree, we started a heated dinner. With beer and spicy and hot food after a while, voices were rising as well. I could not hear people on the other end of the table. At one point, four-year-old Jenny, the only kid joining us, screamed at us, "you are too noisy! Is there any royal law here (which is from the movie Kong Fu) !"

Americans would never know how we could be this happy with 6 or 7 pairs of chopsticks fishing food in the single pot of soup. We were just happy.

It seems that becoming happy has become much easier while living in America.