Mid-Autumn Mooncake Celebration

I couldn't wait for Saturday night to roll around, I had been stressed & had probably stressing everyone else (especially Lesley) involved in planning the Mooncake Celebration, I had volunteered to make invitations (I don't know why but I love making invitations!)which was not the norm in previous "cultural nights", and to order & pickup the mooncake, and to research & printout the history, & to buy some of the prizes. So as you can see the stress was actually self induced. Saturday night finally arrives and it was so great to see everyone really dressed up in their pajamas/sleepwear, some were cute, some sexy, some fashionable & some downright hilarious complete with curlers, night cream - the works! We started the night with a great dinner courtesy of Jackie & catered by the legendary Quik Snak from Binondo, we chose this place bec. we knew that they specialized in authentic Fookienese delicacies, dishes we knew most of our friends weren't very familiar with. After dinner we started the main program which involved some games that we thought up, the first was the trivia game - I had printed out individual cards about the history of the moon goddess, the mooncake & the dice game & distributed them for everyone to read, then we had questions based on what they had read & gave out prizes to the winner. our next game involved chinese writing, Lesley earlier in the day picked out a phrase that contained 5 characters, the game involved 5 volunteers who were given 10 seconds to memorize the sequence of the said characters that was being flashed to them, we then jumbled up the characters and they had to write it down, most everyone got the right sequence so we had to judge the winner based on best handwriting. our last activity for the night was the judging for best in sleepwear. during dinner we had already discussed our top 3 picks for male & female, so the 6 finalist who were Mae, Dina, Grace, Billy, Rodney & Carlos had to strut their stuff to the enthusiastic crowd, Dina & Carlos were named winners although it was actually sudden death with Mae & Dina who were neck & neck in votes, they had to play one round of rock, paper, scissors before Dina could emerge victorious. So now we reach the nights main event, the Mooncake Dice game. Jackie starts out by reading the rules, making clear the possible winning combinations. So after a slow start everyone seemed to get really into the game mid way through, there was yelling, cheering & lots of laughter, with most people content to winning at least a "champoy" rather than nothing at all. But the night ultimately belonged to Mia Jimenez, she was the only one who hit the winning "cheong guan" not once but twice - even outranking herself on her 2nd win!! And to think that she & her sister Ana (who was also a big winner) weren't even going to come at first, I'm sure they were glad that they changed their minds. The game finally ended but the night continued on with the free photo session complete with chinese costumes, it was so great to see everyone hamming it up infront of the camera. But as they say alls well that ends well, everyone gave us a big applause as the party winded down, so sweet of them. There's already plans for the next cultural night to be hosted by the "teens" in the group, this time complete with a halloween theme. can't wait. Click for pictures Part 1 and Part 2 and Part 3 and Part 4