No this is not a spelling mistake of anniversary, this is a no versary like no no no, its the only anniversary that I don’t want to have. What is that? Its the Coronavirus’ anniversary #oh no >.< Covid first outbreak was slightly before Chinese new year and for this year, Chinese new year fall on 12th February and it still not gone people! pfff
If I’m in Indonesia this is the time that our family (who are still in Indonesia) will gather up at our Grandpa’s home back in my hometown, but since Grandpa already passed away, we will go to his sister as now she is the oldest but….. with Covid, even the Indonesian will not gather up therefore we do the normal things to do at this moment which is… via zoom!
The idea came up from my aunt and she asked for a time that is workable and since CNY is not a public holiday in Germany and Australia so the one that are in Indonesia will have to adjust it.
I suggested 08:00AM for Germany, 14:00PM for Indonesia, 15:00PM for Singapore and 18:00 for Australia. Lucky me, the CNY was on the period where I am doing WFH 😉
I only have the free account so every 40 mins need to log-in back and my sister asked me “is it not enough 40 mins?” and I said no way! we will have like 30 mins only to “Hallo hallo, can you hear me?” and another 30 mins to “bye bye bye” haha
Guess what? I was right 😉 not a surprise, we started with counting the attendees one by one we were “where is she?” yes, she, as you can see my Grandpa had 5 kids, only 2 of them are male and each kids has 2 kids, only 2 of them are male mwahaha so no need to ask “where is he?” because the number of “he” is really low in comparison to the number of “she”
I was calling and working at the same time and my cousin in Melbourne asked me if I already start to work? and I said yes, I started work at 07:45 AM and she was “Omg nobody in AU works at that time we all start like 09:00 or 09:30” haha yes this is Germany surprise not surprise #facepalm
It took a while until all of us were there and we always said to each of them “恭喜恭喜 (Gong Xi Gong Xi)” and I meant to each of us there, so the conversation won’t be anything important as we were busy of saying those sentence haha and for Frida (because she already has 2 kids) each kids also need to say it to everyone like “Aunty Marlyn 恭喜” until the point where my sister “okay stop, we have been saying it for like 70 times” hahaha!
After we said “hi, hi, hi” followed by “Gong Xi Gong Xi” followed by our stories blablabla and another “bye bye bye” and my father said “When Mustika (the name of my late Grandpa’s store) said bye it won’t finished in 30 minutes” and yep indeed haha we just have to say it one by one so that’s why it took ages 🙂
I’m glad that we have the video call though, at the moment it is the best we can do and hopefully by next Chinese new year we could all celebrate somewhere, perhaps in Australia where my oldest Aunty lives 🙂 and yes peeps, we as Asian tend to put more respect to family members that is older.
Ox in Chinese is “牛 (Niu)” and in the umgangssprache “Niu” has the meaning of awesome. So, I really wish for a 牛 year! We need to stay healthy for the whole year and many years to come until Covid anniversary become a-no-versary!
