A Birthday Story in Pictures

CAN YOU HANDLE IT?!

 Chinese birthday cake.  It tastes even more gross than it looks, actually.  But appreciated, nonetheless. 

               With my students at our usual restaurant to celebrate on birthday's eve.

                      Birthday cake eaten with chopsticks.  It just seems so wrong. 

 

 So cute

On my birthday, Luke took me to a hotpot restaurant for lunch.  (This is a hotpot - there's a electric hotplate underneath, built into the table.)  The restaurant was like the Chinese version of Olive garden, with kids running around and tacky/tasteful decor. Adorable. 

 

 

 So you tell the waitress if you want your hotpot all spicy, all non-spicy, or half and half.  Then you go over to the buffet area and pick out your raw food and bring it to your table.

Strange floppy gooey rice things, and gelatinous green eggs with oozey sticky yolks.  I'm so confused about how they get the eggs to do that.  It must be a magical process.

                                               

 

 Then Luke said, "You wanna try some brain?" Now, I know that Chinese people like to eat meats that seem weird to me on a regular basis, but I totally thought he was kidding.  But...nope.  Pig's brain.  At Olive Garden. 

And the brain after being cooked in the hotpot.  I tried a piece like the size of a pea and thought it had a disgusting texture and taste.  Then half an hour later I tried again, for kicks, and it didn't seem any better.

And pig's blood, solidified, of course. 

I like to think I eat adventurously on a daily basis, as it is sort of unavoidable unless I cooked for myself every meal of every day.  But I suppose there's only so much adventure that can happen when you can't read a menu and there's nobody to suggest the weird things and you're not exactly sure where to go to get what.  Eating with Luke is like a whole different level of food adventure.

And then Allison and Mary made me a carrot cake!

So it was a good birthday.  I got lots of gifts, including a beautiful porcelain bookmark and nice beaded bracelets and two Chinese cakes.  Cheikh also came to Zhuhai just to give me the gifts he had bought me, and we had a nice sappy conversation.  He got me this not-quite-my-style but perfectly nice purse, which I had been whining that I needed, and some surprisingly funky earrings and a ring.  And he slipped a really cute letter under my door in the morning.  It's like the most attentive and considerate he's ever been, go figure.  I could have used some strawberry jam and cream cheese crepes, though. And a mommy.