Lunar New Year 2007

Chinese all over the world celebrated the Lunar New Year on February 18. However most of them would be back to their home towns for the annual reunion lunch/dinner by February 17, which was the eve of the holiday. For most of our Singapore employees, home town is really the city itself, so there were no long journey home or queueing for buses, trains or planes. Instead, the time was spent on last minute shopping for new year goodies and sundries for the reunion dinner.
For SMD Singapore, we had our new year eat-together on February 28.

The celebration started off with yee-sang, which is the cantonese word for raw fish. Incidentally, yee-sang doesn't originate from Kwangtong province of China or HongKong, where the cantonese dialete is spoken everywhere. This dish originated in either Malaysia or Singapore and because many of the restaurant chefs are of cantonese origin, it is probaby where the cantonese name came from.
We had a group photo for those early birds. Starting from left: Lam Wai Kwok, Anna Sim, Lim Seok Cheng, Kong Ling Ling, Alice Sim, Frank Chua, Koh Siew Koon, Lek Foong Mei, Chen Li Yong and Robert Tai.

We had 2 yee-sang dishes. The one at the foreground has no fish, so is vegetarian and the one at the background has slices of raw fish in it.
Robert Tai un-corking the sparkling apple juice.

Helping themselves at the buffet spread after the yee-sang.Part of the crowd.
and when the morning shift had finished theirs, the afternoon shift arrived. Here you can see Shamsiah, Normala and Faizal.