Chinese New Year -- Singapore Style!

Saturday afternoon a group of us IDers went to our professors house for to celebrate and learn more about Chinese New Year. Prof Teh showed us his house -- which included many collectibles and famous designer furniture.

Saturday night I went to my host families' house for dinner to celebrate day 6 of the 15 day celebration for Chinese New Year Singapore style. Here are a few photos from the dinner....

blurry shot of my host, Ling, on the left and her mother on the right.

Here we are partaking in yusheng. Yusheng is a CNY celebration unique to Singapore. The ingredients include: raw salmon (or other fish), daikon (white radish), carrot, red pepper, ginger, daun limau nipis (lime tree leaves), Chinese parsley, chopped peanuts, toasted sesame seeds, Chinese shrimp crackers (or fried dried shrimp), and a five spice powder all topped off with a plum sauce dressing. Actually tasted really good. Here the trick is to toss it as high as you can. Higher the toss, greater your fortune. Things got much messier at our celebration in the design studio!

Ling's other exchange student and I

The dinner was a nice opportunity to get to know Ling as well her other exchange student, Yvonne. Ling's family is originally from southern China so most of the dinner included seafood. The week before while snorkeling in Ko Samui Thailand I held a sea cucumber -- to the left is a picture i stole from google -- and found myself eating it Saturday night.

Ling's mother told us a bit about the arguous process of preparing sea cucumber and that it is rather expensive here in Singapore. After that I figured I had to at least try some. And its not bad, takes like fish.

One of my goals while in Singapore is to be adventureous with the food as well. Thursday in my design studio we also celebrated CNY, someone brought these little individual packets each containing two duck tongues. Yep, thats right I tried duck toungue. Worth a try but I can't say you'll find me eating it anytime soon....

Gong xi fa cai!