traralgon chinese festival

I have to say it now, I'm definitely not a morning person.

Waking up at 8am was hard. I know, I know, all my classes start at 9am.. but it's a Saturday!

That's besides the point. This morning was particularly cold, my fingers were stiff to the point that it was difficult as is to clench my fist. And the fact that we had to walk to the Binishell where the wind decide to play cruel tricks (no, no one in their right minds wore skirts) made it all the more colder.

Entering the van to get to Traralgon was a really good feeling, cause first off, it was warm. I could feel the heat rushing to the tips of my fingers and that was really really comforting.

On reaching, we realized our little tent was really out of the way and away from the crowd, where the morning market was (no, not our type of pasar pagi where everyone buys fresh meat and veggies, it was more of a pasar malam where they sold a lot of nicknacks just that this was held in the morning... in short, I guess you could call it a bazaar of sorts) so minshen, cat & ricebowl (lipkai I think.. I just like to think that his name is ricebowl cause that was how he introduced himself) were going "omg, this is like an abandoned spot... so far away and isolated..."

There were a few stalls on the day; picture colouring, calligraphy, folding origami pigs, paper dragons, our paper bag puppets and the other was... was... I forgot. It was a mini booth with alot of things to do, well at least for the kids it proved to be a great success. The busiest period was right before the lion-dragon dance cause everyone was waiting, and with nothing to do they strolled over and had lots of things to choose from to do.

At about 10 in the morning the lion-dragon dance commenced, with much life and the loud sound of the drums and cymbals gave the dragon and lions something to dance to. They kind of freaked out the little kids because it does look that bit intimidating.. I mean, that's why they're dancing after all - to chase away evil spirits from our lives (or at least for the year.) People in KL, bear in mind that this was performed by a group of Australians so there was no actual acrobatics or chewing up the cabbage or jumping from one pole to another or peeling the oranges and people giving angpaus to the lions... basically they just danced around the place, freaked the kids out, danced over to the morning market for abit, and then danced back while freaking out some more kids and fellow students alike. It was nowhere near the real thing.. they weren't as loud as they were supposed to be, and the lions and dragon wasn't as alive as it was supposed to be. But hey, you can't get everything, and so for them it was a pretty good effort.

I could tell the majority of the crowd were there to watch the lion-dragon dance performed by the Bendigo Lion Dance Troupe. But on seeing our stall and the irresistably cute animals (hahah I know, blatant promotion, but I think it's true; our animals do look cute X3) the kids gradually streamed in asking to have a tiger, bunny, mouse, panda, dog and of course, being the year of this zodiac animal, the pig. The girls mostly wanted either a bunny or dog, and the boys preferred the pigs, tigers and dogs. Either way the bunnies and tigers were quite a popular choice (and also probably cause we didn't make enough orange paper bags which was why the tigers ran out pretty quickly)

The thing that I liked best about having to do this was watching the kids actually do it for themselves after we taught them how to stick on the googly eyes and ears and noses and arms. I do know that I kept forgetting to colour the black circles before sticking the googly eyes on the pandas and they weren't too bad at it... but for those that had less than average motor skills I thought I'd save them from going back in tears with a not-so-nice one, so I helped them.

best animal for the day: Sharon and I made a little green dragon for this girl who wanted it, I mean she really asked for a dragon and not the other animals... she deserves some respect! X3 and I enjoyed making the dragon anyhow, looks like my croc just that we added wings to it and gave it a fiercer look X3

Wind this morning was such a frigging bother though.. Every few minutes or so the wind will blow hard enough to try and rip off our neatly tied poster and blow all the bits of paper we cut and in some cases some of our cut pieces of noses, ears and tongues and it'd be a small panic session for me and sharon at the booths trying to make sure they didn't fly away into oblivion.

Lambert and lipkai (ie ricebowl) kept asking why there were Colgate boxes there; they actually thought it served as glue. >____> They were there so that we could make the paper bags, and I tell you these boxes were really made for the job of making paper bags. They were perfect for A4 sized papers too! X3 You don't know how much Sharon and I sang praises to those Colgate boxes. XD I know, that was overdoing it abit, but I know that's what I thought! X3

The rest of the morning was more of fellow students who came to just join in the fun and have some cute little souvenirs to take back, of which we obliged gladly cause otherwise there'd be nothing much to do. The people who came later were lucky cause as we were packing up we didn't really know what to do with what we had so we gave those ready-made ones away and they were pretty happy with that =3 minshen's origami book is great! Wow the pigs he made are really good, and hong ni is really good at folding paper flowers (tulips and roses) of which everyone wanted one (or at least wanted to learn how to make one) and it was really really すごい!

Photographer of the day Cat took most of the pictures from the first minute we got there to the last minute when we were packing up so yeah I'll get the pictures from him whenever he's done the final touchups.