ANYWAY, so I was a little jazzed to go to my hospital director's house for the first time. I expected something formal but when I arrived with my fancy bottle of wine, she was in hair rollers, people were sitting on the floor preparing herbs, and everyone was basically in their PJs. Oh. My bad...but I'm glad I was invited into her cozy family environment.
But yeah, the custom was pretty anticlimactic to what I was expecting. Basically just one person needs to release the carp into the lake or river while everyone stays home to cook and eat. Since I was excited, T and I went. So I hopped onto the back of T's motorbike with one bucket in each hand. One had three small golden carp for the kitchen god to ride on and the other bucket had two eels...I was confused because I didn't read/hear about eels in any of the kitchen god stories but T told me the eels help "guide and pull" the carp to the Jade Emperor. Ok, fair enough.
Well, we are riding along when a guy bikes next to us and says, "One of your eels jumped out back there."
WAAAAAIT! WHAAAAAAT???? Damn it!!!! So we turn around and about a block away we see our eel in the middle of a crowded street going "wiggle wiggle wiggle!" (are u thinking about the same music video I am?) just barely missing the numerous motorcycles and cars driving by. AIYAAAA!!!!
I of course run into the street next to it and just stupidly stand there because I don't want to touch it (Oh, and traffic is now blocked and people are honking and annoyed). Some other young guy comes and helps put the eel in my bucket and off we went again.
As I peered in, I couldn't help but notice it was bleeding...then there was a point where it stopped moving. I'm really worried and tell T but just get the response, "Don't say that, it's bad luck!!!" So off we went and threw three fish, one live eel, and one potentially dead eel into the lake. And T goes, "mission accomplished."
....right. Ugh. Why do things like this always happen to me? Eh, I'm not too surprised - not with my track record, but I don't want to be responsible for bringing a year of bad luck to this family!!!!
And this is what I was imagining as we released our fish and eels into the lake...
The city all lit up for the upcoming New Year...
Might as well end on a positive note. My co-worker came back from
HCMC with two of my most favorite fruits! Mangosteen and "breast milk
fruit"
