August Moon 2013

What a lot of fun! We went it for lunch and played at the Acorn playground while Grace got Baos and other things for the kids. Then we ate there at the tables and then it was off to Moh Goon House. I filled up water and we met the team coming out and rolled ourselves straight down to the stage. My two children had full stomachs and already had got their play in, and had their little Kung Fu outfits on. We got up on stage and they played their smaller instruments. Got pictures of that. And we also were interviewed by BNN network. (how do I get a clip of that?) I did my one stick form and then that was that.
Normally we would have went home. Instead, Grace walked around, I walked around, we met up, bought things that are always sold in Chinatown anyway but when it's a festival you can't help but buy what you normally would not. Plus the ability to walk in the middle of the street somehow makes it ten times cooler than normal Chinatowning. Seriously, At the end of the day, that's when Noah wanted to do after everyone left.
I kept bumping into people I knew, But I couldn't really talk because the crowd flow was like a river. Which actually caused a stroller traffic jam once because Noah dropped (omg what is it and where is it! Freak out!) a bottle cap. Grace went and got a foot massage and then it was off to Moh Goon to decompress. It would have been great, Jonah napping, Noah relaxing. Except instead of relaxing Noah kept smacking Jonah as hard as he could and running away. Jonah was so tired he actually went back to sleep until the twentieth or so time finally woke him up. Noah threw around this soft dice that was given away by a guy representing Mohegan Sun. The big die was awesome. The fact that I'm starting my kid on dice ironic. No I won't use it for gambling, we can use it for board games. But when I was younger than Noah, my dad actually did bring me into the gambling house and I grabbed real dice for crap shooting. For Noah it was a Chinese teenager dressed up as a Native American that gave him his first taste of the gambling world. (Can someone Native American please share their opinion on this?)

We actually stayed for our second performance, the one for the Federation. The kids were tired, we had a ton of people, five heads, and I got to play drum and howl the way only a white guy in the crowd would, which made my team members (the ones that don't really know me and are from Wong Keurng not Woo Ching) start laughing. Usually such insane revelry and marching lion dancing has been restricted to New Year's and cold weather. The times I have been able to do such a thing in warm weather I usually had to plan things, stress out, and do lion head or stilts or something or other. This time I was the crazy old drummer guy. It was fun. On stage Jonah cried. Not because the drum was too loud, as some audience members thought he was crying about (including Grace) Only the people by the instruments knew the real reason. He didn't want to play the small cymbals, He wanted to play the big drum. Maybe in a few years Jonah.
We finished the day with dinner at Asian Garden and watching the Shaolin School perform from the window.
Pretty cool!