Carnival! Part 2 (pics)

Friday started off warm and sunny - it was the perfect day for tank tops and flip flops. I slept in to recover from the previous night, but was still able to seize the day. Wandered around Midway for the better half of the afternoon, running into friends and acquaintances while taking pictures of the booths. This year's theme was 'A Different Time And Place', and there were a few outstanding booths:


Carnival on Midway



Everything from Aztec ruins and Atlantis to Chinese noodle house and Star Wars

What makes the booths so impressive is that the construction is solely a student effort. Beginning as early as January, the architecture and civil engineering majors in various organizations draw up blueprints of the structure; the materials are ordered from a hardware warehouse, and unskilled grunt workers (such as myself, when I was in college) were handed power tools and instructions. It was a giant 3D jigsaw puzzle for us. The art and design majors then get working on their part, calling the artistically competent to help with painting props, walls, etc. It's a major production and everybody invests a lot of time and energy into building these Disney World-worthy carnival booths. In the end, the booths stay up for 3 days, only to be torn down with sledgehammers on Sunday.

The weather turn ugly when ominous grey clouds rolled in and raindrops the size of ping pong balls threatened to dampen everyone's moods. By that time, I couldn't be fazed, but walking around in soggy flip flops is never fun. At 6pm, it was the dinner reunion with my adopted family at Harris Grill. We waited forever, but the food and company were worth it.

After dinner, we were on our way to the bars when C called to say she was... 4 months along! I screamed my head off. It was weird when she got married, even weirder when she bought a nice house in upstate NY, and now it's so weird it's incomprehensible. I'm so happy for her. :) I made her promise that I could buy junior all the baby clothes and toys I want.

I changed into less 'sunny daytime' wear and reconvened with the girls in Oakland. We hit a few bars before I left to pick up Alice at the station. Getting lost in Pittsburgh means meandering to the other side of town; I blamed the pouring rain. Alice joined me in the search for my husband, who had also regressed to his college days at his fraternity. We stayed up a little bit before throwing in the towel... old is old, we didn't have the stamina we used to.

Part 3 tomorrow...

Carnival! Part 1 (pics)

It has begun.

Even yesterday, I was already antsy - Josh and Mark had flown in from California and New York respectively, and we had begun our big cleanup of the apartment. Josh, E and I had dinner at Green Forest, a Brazilian BBQ place in Penn Hills. So good! I miss raw oysters, and boy do I miss hunks of cow grilled to perfection. Mmm mm. Today at work I was counting down the minutes till I could let my hair down and regress to my college days again.

First on the itinerary was the CS50 gala reception at the National Robotics Engineering Consortium. It was out in the ghettos of Lawrenceville, I was starting to feel overdressed... but they did the place up really nicely. Alumni, students and friends of the #1 ranking school for robotics/computer science rubbed shoulders among butler-passed hors d'oeuvres, chocolate fountain stations, and displays of 'celebrity' robots/autonomous machines created by students. There even was a 15-piece jazz band - it was Roger Humphries' group! How cool. After our fill of coconut shrimp, sushi and chocolate-dipped strawberries, we shimmied back to our neck of the woods and prepared to meet up with everyone at our favorite watering hole, PHI.

And *everyone* was there... I got so caught up talking I didn't even get my Midori sour! It was wild, man, wild.


With Angel and Angie


Hubby and Mags. She drinks jet fuel for breakfast.



J and J sandwich; Mag thinks it looks like fun and joins in

I love how even though everyone has moved on (busy jobs, spiffy cars, mortgage... being adult? what's that?), we can still come back to the place where we met and made so many memories, and create more memories just like old times. No distance is too great for friends. (Figuratively and literally - Fabric convinced his company to fly him back from Beijing! Impressive.)

This weekend is going to be so awesome. I just know it. I can't wait till tomorrow...

Happy Easter!

For the past few years, the one thing I've done for Easter was tag along with friends to mass, the other big church event besides Christmas. Last year I stepped it up and had Easter dinner with E's godmother, complete with Pashka and a very easy egg hunt. This year, however, Easter has gone to a whole new level.


Chickies on the Easter Eggspress caboose

When I woke up this morning at the in-laws', there were over a dozen boiled eggs sitting on the table. They were dyed turqoise, purple, pink, blue, yellow, green... So Easter-like, it amused me. I decorated the eggs with stickers of hats, chicks, wings, and fluffy tails; the eggs sat in painted wicker baskets, a paper box, and a paper train humorously named the 'Easter Eggspress'.

Instead of getting a basket chocked full of candy, E and I, still in our PJs, got a bag stuffed with practical goodies. The bag had everything from TSA-approved locks for our big trip this summer to lint brushes for our cat-hairy coats. It was like opening presents at Christmas - never knew Easter could be this fun too. Of course, it wasn't the same as getting marshmallow peeps or chocolate bunnies... :)

At the end of the morning, we reluctantly peeled the eggs so they could sit and chill with the pickled beets (yum!).


Eggshell confetti

A hunk o' ham is in the oven; cranberry bread is on its way. Looking forward to dinner...

Take me out to the ball game

Cool picture taken by fellow Flickrite - Pirates' opening game on Monday

Sakura Matsuri

Drove down to DC this weekend for the final weekend of the Cherry Blossom Festival. We stayed with M in Manassas, in an uppity neighborhood populated by townhouses, condos, and strip malls. E and I were reminded of the simple delight of owning a dishwasher, and we spent a moment marveling at how long we've survived without one. (We're practically neanderthals, I know.) Despite a late arrival, we sat around talking till 3am.

On Saturday, it was 40 degrees F, drizzling and windy. It was pretty effin' miserable. The metro parking lot had cars from as far as Ohio and Florida, people who traveled hundreds of miles to see the famous imports along the Potomac River. I feel bad for the families with little kids that came all this way to experience the festival, only to be greeted with dismal weather. I guess they could go to the museums, but seriously, between picnicking on the mall on a sunny day reveling in spring, and walking for hours learning history... If I were a kid I'd be wailing.

First on the itinerary, by request, is dim sum in Chinatown. Most of the restaurants are pretty seedy-looking, except for Tony Cheng's. It was a Mongolian restaurant on the first floor and a Chinese/seafood place on the second, built in the style of an authentic Cantonese restaurant. I thought the food was okay; for not having had chee cheong fun in forever, anything goes, but I did wish they had more of a variety. I tried not to think that the food was shipped from NYC and zapped in a microwave oven. E enjoyed it, though M merely poked around the food on her plate. (M is Jewish. I took her to dim sum. Oops!) Fortunately they had some kosher food (like chicken dumplings), but I was still pretty embarrassed. Thanks for being a good sport!

We braved the wind and rain and trekked from Gallery Place to Federal Triangle. There were about three blocks of tents set up, and it wasn't nearly as packed as last year. Still a decent turnout, some even in cosplay gear (from the Katsucon?). The arts and crafts booths were predictable (bonsai, dolls, origami, bamboo furniture), but there were some really neat displays. Origami sugar creations attracted a fair crowd - there were sugar cranes, butterflies, business card-sized edible Hokusai prints that looked like stained glass... Cool beans! Even though I was stuffed from brunch, I couldn't resist getting a box of warabimochi from a food stand. Then it seemed like a good idea, naturally, to wash it down with real sake - for a pretty penny, we each got 4 oz. of Kuromatsu-Hakushika (a Junmai Ginjo brewed by Taatsuma-Honke). Not bad... far better than the domestic Gekkeikan, to say the least. We bounced from booth to booth in the remaining time before they closed up early because of the weather. By the end of the street festival we were popsicles, but happy popsicles.

As we approached the Washington Monument, we realized that we weren't going to see cherry blossoms. We had missed the bloom's peak by about 10 days, we later found out, so all we saw were bare branches and scattered sprigs of green.


Sparse cherry blossoms against the backdrop of Washington Monument and grey skies

K's birthday party was that evening - it was the second instalment of 'The Great Gatsby' parties. Her parents got a folksy bluegrass band; there was gin punch, wine, finger food, and great company. Friends we haven't seen in ages were there, and my how we've grown. Some cake and trick candles later, around midnight, the ten of us were still lounging around K's living room even though K and her family had retired for the night.

On Sunday we spent most of the day at the International Spy Museum. Cool place! The museum shop was stocked with Nancy Drew novels, Pink Panther plush, James Bond paraphernalia, spy board games... everything from shot glasses and survival handbooks to $450 gadgets. It took us 3 hours to wander through the museum, which was well laid out for a small-ish building. I have to admit it was quite educational. We stopped at Gordon Biersch, the microbrewery across the street, before going on our merry way back to Pittsburgh.

It was a good trip. No good photos, just a lousy T-shirt. :)

Peekaboo

Baby buried under a blue blankie

Asian food (and how I married an Asian)

With depleting rations and nasty cravings that couldn't be ignored, a trip to the Asian grocery store was in order. I was elected the designated shopper.

A city this size and demographics doesn't really have the market to support a full out Chinatown like SF or NY, but the Strip District is a temporary fix, and we make do. It's an amalgam of Polish, Italian, Greek, Korean, Middle Eastern, Chinese, Japanese, and everything-in-between cultures, with food and specialty items sold in stores lined up shoulder to shoulder along a strip near downtown. (Imagine what a perfect image of ethnic diversity tourists see.) My favorite stores to hit are Lotus Foods, a Chinese grocery store that has two dozen brands of soy sauce and an assortment of kitschy household items, and Sam-Bok, run by an elderly Korean couple, where I get my naeng myun and homemade kim-chi.

Lotus Foods has really come a long way since my first visit there a few years ago. My mother always made me smuggle food from home, from Thai fish sauce and chili paste to dried shrimp to rice porridge seasonings, just because she knew I couldn't get any here. (We never really tried to do it with durian products.) I would cherish my supplies like gold; once, I was reaching for my kecap manis on the top shelf when it fell and broke on the floor. I think I cried. I couldn't stop lamenting how deprived I was; if I couldn't find my favorite Asian food in restaurants, then this godforsaken place should at least let me recreate it in my kitchen, but I couldn't even do that.

So much bitterness, until I strolled down the aisles of Lotus yesterday and found them stocked with things I never thought would ever be found in a 200-mile radius of Pittsburgh. Fermented rice (tapé ketan), red fermented rice, durian ice-cream, banana leaves, Hong Kong bakery style pastries, dried shrimp, Khong Guan crackers, every rice porridge seasoning you could imagine, Owl instant coffee... I was speechless. Where did they come from?? Maybe people wrote to the manager and asked for them. Maybe they realize that as the only decent Asian grocer in town (Lotus is Chinatown), they have a responsibility to be well-stocked for homesick lads 'n lasses like myself.

----------------------------------------------------------

I came home with a carload of food that I paid a pittance for. Hubby greeted me excitedly and hovered over the bags like a starved puppy. He only asked for dried mangoes, red bean buns and instant soybean pudding, so his eyes widened when I showed him all that I got. He was practically jumping for joy over the Japanese gummy candy, Khong Guan Square Puffs, spring roll wrappers, Lee Kum Kee sauces... I've never seen anyone so genuinely excited about Sriracha hot sauce. The flurry of excitement upon my return from the store could be best described as if he were, hm, Asian. (Intriguing!) As we shared a mung bean pancake freshly grilled from a street vendor, he admitted that his discovery and growing passion of Asian gastronomy might turn him away from frozen dinners for good. Knowing him, that's saying a lot. :)

This morning I noticed the soybean pudding bag was already opened, before I got to it. One red bean bun and some longan red date tea is missing. I can almost guess what the hubby had for breakfast. If I make kaya toast and egg for myself (a la this cafe in Singapore), he'll be sure to mooch some.

How a boy from the rural hills of Pennsylvania raised on meat 'n potatoes can appreciate chilled sweet mung bean soup, char siu buns, pork floss, and bubble tea more than me, will always be a mystery. But that's why I love him, and hopefully we'll be able to inspire our brand of gluttony in our kids some day. :)