Lions in the Neighbourhood

One of the houses down the road from us had a lion dance today. Initially when the cymbals started crashing and the drums started rolling, both boys had a slight look of panic. Rather like a "we're being attacked!!" look.

So I had to manage it by exclaiming in my best fake happy voice, "Yay! A lion dance! Let's go check it out." I immediately swooped Adik out of his highchair and tore him away from his lunch, shirt covered in soup and all, and headed for the door. Abang was on his way to taking a shower so had stripped down to his underwear but I let him out of the house anyway. We observed from our own garden because we could see the lion dance quite well from here.

I would have loved to take them both to see the lion dance up close and maybe take some photos of them next to the lion dancers but a) my older son was wearing next to nothing, and b) my younger son was obviously happy to not be too close to all that noise. Adik kept referring to it as "Dragon" - when they were dancing he kept saying "Dragon go home!" but after they left he'd say "Dragon come back!".

The picture above is about the best I could do from so far. At this point the "lion" was just about to reach up and grab something that was hanging from the ceiling (I don't know what it was; if I was closer I could have seen it!).

Anyway it was great fun. A bit loud, but I guess that's part of the package. It ended with the firecrackers. Strangely enough, as this first team was about done, another team pulled up and about 15 minutes later they started doing a lion dance too!

Fascinating.