chinese new year dinners

as is customary during chinese new year, i got to meet up with family. i had dinners on new year's eve and on the first. both dinners were fairly small affairs, 4 or 5 people in all. the nice thing about a smaller dinner is that everyone can talk to all of the other people. the only caveat is that everyone needs to speak the same language--which apparently my family does not. so both of my chinese new year dinner conversations ended up as a mishmash of cantonese, shanghainese, mandarin, and english. which probably means that i should work on my cantonese.