Was haben Sie in der neue Jahr gemacht?

Viel! viel! Essen und trinken! Tanzen und schlafen! (es tut mir leid, ich hat eine Deutsche essay geschrieben)

Just to recap the New Year festivities. On New Year's eve, Lionel and I bundled ourselves up nice and warm and took the train to Walton-on-Thames where my aunty lives with her two cats, Molly and Henry. I like steamboat, and I like it even better when my aunt does it with loads of prawns and cuttlefish! We got on really well with my aunt's friend's daughters who were our age. That was rather strange. I don't ever get off to a good start with girls. I'm much better with guys because you don't get the feeling that they're sizing you up, unless they're trying to hit on you. But these two girls were just so chatty and we had a pretty flowing conversation from animal activists to the Da Vinci code.

New Year's day was slightly more relaxed than usual. It helped that it fell on a Sunday, of which I spent half a day on my Control Engineering report. The potluck at my place was a little last minute, but since Nicole and I were set on not spending Chinese New Year with housemates we aren't extremely close to, thus we had the Malaysians and Fidel over to my place to tuck in on a delicious feast of Yee Sang, spring rolls, Four Seasons duck, roast duck popiah, nian gou, agar-agar and the most un-Chinesy of all - Chocolate Fondue!!! (The story of my fondue pot will come soon in a separate post about my birthday... when I finally sit down and write it). I didn't have to cook a single thing (apart from deep frying spring rolls) and yet received a free flow of compliments on the great food throughout the night. I love these guys. It's just too easy to con all of them into thinking I'm such a marvelous cook. I was particularly happy that Ayish, the vegetarian, had enough to eat! Years of having to plan vegan appropriate dishes for Sugi and Maggie have paid off!

And so that was new year - playing with the iDog, laughing at Tock trying to sing in Mandarin, and accidently pouring chocolate fondue on spring rolls. A good start to a dog year. I've already got two pups to look after - Ba Kua my nintendog and now the iDog. Lets see how this goes.