Happy Chinese New Year!

Happy Year of the Dragon, people! I decided that this year I would be celebrating  CNY with lanterns and dragons and lion dances and firecrackers and so I booked some tickets to London to hang out with various friends and have a Chinese banquet!


Except I didn't do my research and found out afterwards that if CNY falls on a weekday, then the big celebrations are the weekend after. Dangit. But it doesn't matter.

Because the decorations were out!!!

And the Asians were also out - in FORCE!!!

I selected Four Seasons as the place to eat given my enjoyment of their bbq'd meats last time I was in London. Dinner had been booked for 7:30pm and I met up again with Lydia to kill time in Covent Garden/Soho before heading to the restaurant...

...which is how I ended up doing nyan nyan pose in the m&m store in Leicester Square! Celebrating the Asian posing!!! Thanks to Suboo for the link to the highly enlightening website!

Takers for dinner were J, the Friendly Dragon, Leesh, JC, Miss Amandine, Dan, Lydia and Liz. This meant we got to order a lot of food :D

Dragon, Leesh, JC with the (clockwise from top) Peking duck and pancakes (in the steamer), stir fried veggies, straw mushies with crab meat, and the salty egg prawns. 

The remnants of the whole steamed sea bass with ginger and spring onions

I was too busy eating to take photos but this was a Cantonese roast duck

And this was the 3 mixed bbq meats - cha siu pork, pork belly, and soy chicken. 

We were being a whole lot of Asian fail when ordering. None of us spoke either Mandarin or Cantonese completely so when the waiter came to ask for our order, we had a bit of confusion explaining the kinds of ducks we wanted. He actually walked away in exasperation! But we figured it all out later and he cracked a few jokes with us once he realised we were serious about eating A LOT of food. In fact, we later ordered a plate of tofu because we decided the meat to veg ratio wasn't right!

Eventually, we had to concede that we'd had enough food to eat and left to go home. There were still quite a few people waiting to get inside to eat! And once I got home, I went to surprise Smee with the present I got him while shopping in Covent Garden - a plus doll of Swedish Chef from The Muppets!

And so here I am doing Asian posing with him!

It's actually a really good plush - looks just like him!