dannyman.toldme.com

Boom Boom Boom Boom

Well, the family just left, and Yayoi is down at Navy Pier with Brian and his sisters to watch the fireworks. So, I have the place to myself. Time to check out this new software.

Yesterday I had to Google for “how to tie a tie” and I found that the third hit returned was the best one. So, I mention it here in the hope that this page will get a better placement. We went off to Li Chun’s wedding, in Chinatown. It was a spectacular affair. About 80% of the thing was in Cantonese, with some translation into English. The wedding banquet was a twelve course meal, give or take, of top-notch Chinese food. If you want to hear see what a Chinese wedding banquet is like then you need to procure yourself a copy of Ang Lee’s “The Wedding Banquet” which would give you a fair idea of what ours was like. It is a culture that knows how to have fun. The groom speaks Mandarin and the bride’s family speaks Cantonese. (These are two dialects of “Chinese” which has a common written language, but sounds completely different in different parts of the country. You can’t understand folk from Naw’lins or Scotland? Same thing, but with an extra few millenia of history …) So, as part of the amusement had at the expense of the wedded couple, the groom had to recite wedding vows in Cantonese. I know that this was a very funny ordeal, because I was laughing. And I wasn’t laughing because I understood what he was saying, but because everyone else was laughing, and whether we all spoke the same language or not, we all understood that the guy was happy to have everyone laughing at his expense because at the end of the night, he got to go off with the bride.

We skipped out on the Grant Park Fireworks, which were a bit under the weather yesterday anyway. When we got home, the neighbors were shooting off all sorts of colorful burning things in the street. And they’re still at it. Been at it all day. We had a BBQ at my place, which was pretty low-key and yummy except for the repetetive BANGBANGBANG next door.

It’s actually a few minutes after 9PM, and I had to run out the door and down the block because all hell broke loose just around then, and I wanted to know where those fireworks were coming from. I’ll have to close out here soon and see what sort of entertainment is threatening to burn down the neighborhood this evening.

This on top of the ice cream trucks, Mexican music, and car horns that serve as doorbells on our block on quieter days. The place is alive!