生日

This past weekend I celebrated the official addition of one more year to my age (age++). I expected the event to be a quiet affair but was pleasantly surprised that it developed into a weekend of delicious dinners and simple surprises.

As you may know, cheese is a rather uncommon ingredient in East Asian meals.  With this in mind, my friend and I sought to create a feast able to satisfy our western palettes. The prep began with a trip to one of the larger groceries in the area. Tomato paste, cheese (offered in the classic Kraft single serving style), and coffee stood out on our long receipt not only as the most expensive purchases but also as the mark of the foreigner.

With an afternoon of washing, cutting, chopping, and dicing we managed to prepare a delicious Saturday meal. Two variations of salsa, spaghetti with tomato sauce and beef, and buttered garlic bread were all delicious escapes from our normal rice, noodle, and vegetable centric diet.

However, the star of the evening were a specially prepared batch of Mantou Nachos. In the absence of good tortilla chips, we instead took mantou which is steamed bread and cut it into thin slices which were then fried. These were then topped with cheese,beef, and salsa. Overall, an awesome meal.

The next day I was treated to a cultural excursion to a Pizza Hut. Unlike American Pizza Huts, the restaurant is quite nice in china (though the service is hit and miss). Oddly, drinks cost upwards of 8x their normal price but the pizzas were surprisingly cheap. For a cheese pizza the cost was only 70 RMB (basically U.S. prices). A Hawaiian pizza was slightly cheaper. However the staple of the American pizza landscape was oddly absent- Pepperoni Pizza was nowhere to be found. After gorging ourselves on three pizzas, I was presented with a gift from my employer.

The gift was an awesome set of matching items that included a pen, card holder, and USB key. In my mind, it was a perfect representation of the ongoing clash between modern and traditional China.

The final surprise was a birthday cake delivered to my apartment while I was at work the following day. The cake was truly quite large and I have yet to finish it, despite receiving help from my friends. Luckily, it was just small enough to fit in my fridge so it has not gone to waste.

Overall, it was a very pleasurable way to mark a birthday and, best of all, no singing was required.