[Pre-180, My SJI Days] The Chinese New Year Reunion Lunch with our classmates!

One thing I bet you've never done in school was to have a Chinese New Year reunion lunch, hotpot-style, with your classmates! That's one of the many plus points of SJI Senior School. The cohort is small, and henceforth, we get to enjoy fun activities like this.

This reunion lunch event was organised by our SJI Senior School Chinese Department teachers in celebration of the Year of the Goat (ie. Year 2015). Everyone in the cohort was told that since we would be going to different universities and walking different paths after our Junior College days, we would be having a reunion lunch to remember that as a school family, we will all have to come back together often.  A heartwarming backdrop to the celebratory event.

The reunion lunch was held on the Wednesday leading up to Chinese New Year 2015. All students are to have lunch with their classmates and we had to bring our own hotpot ingredients and our hotplate/induction cooker for the lunch (ie. pot luck). In addition, we were also briefed by our cohort teachers that the JC2 level meeting before lunch was cancelled to extend our lunch time for the hotpot reunion. Yay! :D

Kudos to our Chinese teachers for thinking of such a creative and interesting celebratory activity! And kudos to our supportive level head (and of course all the teachers) for being such a good sport (and giving us another hour of lunch)! It was the something all of us in the cohort (I can safely say so) felt was extremely special and unique. Everyone was very excited and hyped up when we first heard of the celebratory event.

The day was extremely fun. For a feel, it went like this:

At the start of the reunion lunch, all of us went rushing to the canteen sinks to wash our utensils, hotplates and vegetables. Then we started putting food on the table, and getting the hotpot plugged to the school power outlet (hoping that it will not overwhelm the power outlet ie. hoping that there won't be any short circuits.)

And we had our lunch.

But as usual, there were multiple 'hiccups' and 'funny episodes' that came up in between the lunch! :) For instance, our classmate who was responsible for bringing us all the meat, had no idea that he had to bring us meat, and we had to have a vegetarian hotpot thanks to him...while other classes were having fish, beef shabu shabu and seafood (not sure if any table has abalone though :) ).  You can imagine the ingredients we were left with (ie. see photograph below)...ALL VEGETABLES AN FISHBALLS!!! :D So in the end, our kind teachers (who were also having a reunion lunch by themselves), gave us a plate of beef as it's a taboo to eat only vegetables for reunion lunch (Reunion lunches were meant to be a feast to kick start the year. If one eats only fishballs and vegetables for a reunion lunch, it might mean that he or she will only get to eat fishballs and vegetables in the coming years; not applicable to vegetarians though). 

         
                     

And amidst the 'funny episodes', our IB Coordinator, Mr Tang, started giving out Ang Paos (with chocolate gold coins) to all the students in exchange for a good phrase to start the year! He's like the God of Wealth aka 财神爷 who came to deliver fortune to us! :) What a good surprise!

Time flies during such happy times and we soon realised that lunch time was over. We had to wash our hotpots and get back to lessons. :) 

All in all, a fun experience. I really appreciate the effort of our teachers in organising, planning and executing the activity. A lot of hard work is needed to execute such a tedious activity. and they had to take the risk of the event not turning out well. A big thank you to Ms Boon Yen Ping, Ms Annie Wong and our SJI Senior School teachers for organising and supporting this activity! :)

*Credits to Ms Boon Yen Ping for the photographs. :)