It's all Taiwan

So today we were invited to go view another round of the fireworks competition - this time between Austria and Taiwan.  Sorry Austria, you lost.  Taiwan was incredible.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.  This story began a week ago at the Old Taipa Tavern, during an outing described in a previous post.  Janice, British gin drinker extraordinaire, decided to invite a bunch of people over to see the fireworks because she has a flat near the school with a great view.

On a side note, when I was shopping in HK last weekend, I found some pants I liked, but the "shorts" were too short, so I bought them in "long".  This meant they needed hemming.  After trying and failing to communicate my request to an alterations shop, I decided to send an email around to my coworkers to see if anyone had a machine.

Janice came to the rescue and said that if I would teach her to use it I could borrow it as often as I liked.  (Someone left it with her and she doesn't sew.)  So I showed up about half an hour early for the party with my pants ready to go.  After working out a few initial quirks with the machine I was up and running.  Mark, a fellow ELC teacher, also came early and took the "action shot" above.  He couldn't believe I was sewing over the pins and said "Aren't you worried you'll break the needle?"  I replied that it rarely happened and the worst thing you could probably expect was a bent pin.  Apparently this was a jinx, because I bent all kinds of pins, one almost beyond recognition.  But the pants turned out well and I don't think anyone will notice the crooked spots where the bent pins were.  Mark assures me he'll be bringing me all his pants from now on.

The food was incredible - Janice is a fantastic hostess and cooked a bunch of wonderful food for us.  As you can see there's tasty cheeses and bread, fresh veggies with aoli, boiled potatoes, several delicious salads, and more.  Miranda also brought Korean style sushi - called gimbap.  All very good.

The drink in the glass is called a Boodle and I get the impression that Janice is somewhat famous for making them.  After consulting the internets, I see that Boodle's is a brand of gin, so I'm not sure if Janice made this drink up or if there are many ways of making a Boodle as long as you use that gin.  Further study seems necessary.
Anyway, this one was made with gin, cointreau, martini and orange juice.  It was good, but powerful.  One needs to go easy when Janice is mixing the drinks.  :)


Also there was a round of desserts with fruit, brownies, cheesecake and banana bread.  Yum!

 Janice has a lovely place and it is decorated with all kinds of sculpture from Papau, New Guinea, where she used to live.  I particularly liked this alligator.  It appeared to be mahogany with mother-of-pearl inlay.

She had a really good turnout, and rather than try to capture all the people, I took the easy route and just went for their shoes.

Can anyone spot mine?

The fireworks were good - as I indicated above, but Taiwan was fantastic.  By far the best I've seen so far.  I've included a vid below to give you some idea.  In addition to putting on a good show in general, they were also impressive because they had a lot of the fireworks that make shapes or designs, like smiley faces, hearts, Saturn-esque designs, and much more.  I tried to capture some of them below.  Janice insisted that anyone who wanted to be invited back needed to yell "Wow" or something equally good at regular intervals, plus many people have been drinking, so it's loud.  Also one of my coworkers had her tweener son along and he's got his own commentary going for much of the video, so you'll probably notice that as well.  Enjoy!