Christmas break in Scotland

Unlike last year's adventurous christmas in the Gambia, this christmas was back to peace, quiet and nice homeish style with lots of eating. We spent a few days in Brian's home in Scotland with his family. Sara and her friend Marianma travelled all the way from Africa back home for xmas too. Nice to see them again, it has been a year since we met in the Gambia. Christmas in the West is always the same to me, very much like Chinese New Year, people meet up with friends and families and involve continuous eating events.

Instead of Chinese New Year markets they have christmas markets, christmas trees instead of "peach flower", christmas flowers instead of little mandarin trees, presents instead of red pockets, turkeys instead of various Chinese New Year dishes. To some people Christmas is celebrating the birth of Jesus, but to a lot of them it is just a once a year family reunion, the idea is entirely the same as Chinese New Year. I have not been home for a few Chinese New Years already, not been able to receive my eldest sister's red pockets (Only married people give them). I am really looking forward to Feb.



Same as usual as Elizabeth said, I had my birthday on Christmas Eve. Brian made me a nice sweet birthday cake. Prior to Christmas I received a few birthday presents. My sister said I was robbing people by visiting during Christmas time. Having being born on Christmas Eve was not my choice though, although I quite enjoy it.




Everytime we visit Brian's family we cook a Chinese dinner for people, this time is no different. Although I don't really think we are particular good at cooking, people seems to like it very much. As long as they enjoy our food we are happy to cook :).

Christmas at IBM

I should have written this post about 2 weeks ago but I think never too late. This christmas at work differs a bit from the previous two years, coz this is the first year I (or We as the old Maersk Data folks) am with IBM. At the start of the month I was quite a bit disappointed. The huge christmas trees we used to have, which were about 3 floors tall (really, they were the biggest indoor christmas trees I have seen), were shrinked into a few feets in height. I do not need to squeeze pass the reception hall to avoid walking into the tree anymore. Well, I treated it as environment friendliness to use a smaller tree. While I was thinking I might not be getting any christmas present from work this year, my thought turned into a little surprise. There were two different kinds of boxes: Mediterranean style spices and Japanese style seasoning. I got a Mediterranean one, but since both Brian and I don't drink wine and I am not really a fan of Mediterranean food, I swapped with Anders for a Jap box.
It is quite nice, with quite a few different bottles of seasoning, rice, wasabi beans, 4 big bottles of Jap beers, green tea and a nice looking cook book (in danish...) It even contains a couple pairs of chopsticks, seems to fit us well. I know it is not nice to compare I just cannot help it, compare to what we used to get, the boxes shrinked too.

Awarded

Same as before, I have not updated my blog for a significant amount of time. A few of the very few of my readers complained about it. I guess it is time to write something now since I finally have something more interesting to tell.

I have been awarded a "Bravo Award" today by the department. Set aside the actual money matter, this award means a lot to me. First of all, I have not got any award for years now. I used to be a frequent award receiver when I was in primary school. The glory years suddenly disappeared since the day I started in a band 1 secondary school. What was the good for entering a good school? I lost all the fame and confidence! I was buried! After I got kicked out (I was so glad to tell you the truth), the good days came again when I started in a lower band school. I got all the honors and attention back to me again, till I started uni. But of course, the older you get, the lesser chance you would get awarded. This I take it as an adult life. You do not get a sweet by doing your homework quick, but really need to work real hard to get noticed. So every so often you have to award your self for something, no matter a gadget or a nice dinner.

The second important meaning of this award is, I proved the statement "You cannot perform if you don't speak danish" wrong. That statement was threw on to my face not long ago. Now I can proudly say I can always perform if I have the motivation to. Perhaps you can argue that statement was part of my motivation, then I have to say thank you to the speaker. So, "Don't give up even you got looked down upon" now become my golden rule.