Theng2 To the Airport

Thursday. Theng Theng has a trip to Kuala Lumpur to a practice dance examination. This is the practice run. The real exam is in October. Because of the Muslim new year, the roads are congested, so the dance teacher who is escorting four or five students decided they should all go by plane.

To Theng2's credit, she signed on to the web site and booked the tickets herself. She was told to use Firefly.com, a budget airline (code shared with MAS). Seng was horrified to find the fare came to RM 400+. Well, this is the holiday season here, so the tickets are in high demand.

The day started (relatively) early at 6:30AM. Seng and Theng2 came downstairs and prepared to go to the airport. I tried to take a picture of Theng2 for the blog, but as with all teenagers, she artfully dodged the camera every time I tried to take aim.

I followed them to the airport, and again tried to take a picture of her with my camera phone. Finally, here she is. She is the one in blue jeans, facing away from the camera. Paula is very interested in seeing all the kids' pictures, and she wants to know how old they are, and what grade they are attending now. I am afraid I am not able to get them stay still long enough to pose for me.

We had rice with mixed meat topping for lunch. This is good, fragrant rice, with extra toppings: barbecue pork, soy sauce chicken, and roast pork. Very nice flavors.
The rice came with packets of garlic chili sauce. This is good to spread over the rice and meat mixture. The chili sauce has a lime taste, so I presume it is made of lime juice, chopped garlic, and chopped fresh red chili. It is good as a dipping sauce for the meat as well.




At the end of the day, Seng went to the front door and burned some "silver paper". This is as an offering to the nether world. In the Chinese traditions, the seventh month is the month of the ghosts. On the last day of the month, the 30th day, the ghosts are let out to roam, to settle scores, to visit, etc. The faithful living will light up candles, burn incense, and 'silver paper' as offerings to the ghosts. This was supposed to be a couple of days ago, but we forgot, so this is a make-up offering.
Seng was burning the silver paper as is. I tried to roll up a few to fold into the shape of silver ingots, but did not do a very good job. I remember rolling hundreds of them when I was little, living with my grandmother. We will make a big pile of ingots and set fire to the pile, sending them to the under world as offerings.

On some occasions, like funerals, people will burn paper furniture, paper cars, even paper TV as offerings, sort of a Western Union for the dead. Since death is an unknown, people try to play it safe and send whatever they think is necessary. I suppose paper laptops, and paper modems is not far behind.