Birthday Celebrations

Somehow what should have been a very average birthday celebration (I mean it's only 26, not like the big 3-0 that a few special people will be celebrating soon....) has turned into a multi-weekend extravaganza. Two Hong Kong friends here also have birthdays close to mine, so we piggy-backed on several celebrations, and things grew continuously from there. Thanks to my loving husband for putting so much of this together, helping to mask the fact that this is really the first birthday ever I celebrated without my immediate family in some way. But, seeing as Steph and Leah are coming in April, meaning we can all celebrate our March birthdays together in one go, I guess I'm just a lucky girl.

The festivities started with a dinner at a cooked food center in North Point. Cooked food centers are normally very local, family oriented cafeterias attached to a neighborhood wet market. The food is cheap but delicious. The middle of the room is filled with family-style tables, and the shop owners harass you to sit in their section of tables, ensuring you order from their food stall. This food center was a bit different. First, it was packed, and I mean PACKED, with people. Second, a lot of those people were businessmen, out for a company outing. Third, those said businessmen were wasted, prompting them to blast clubbing music and dance provocatively on table (Not kidding). The end result was a really fun, exciting dinner with great food, great company (not the businessmen), and great entertainment (the businessmen). This dinner was actually a joint birthday celebration for myself and my friend Jill from Chicago. She is the pretty lady in pink in the second photo.

The second birthday celebration occurred the following evening, when Drew and I joined our friend Frank and lots of his friends for all-you-can-eat hot pot. Hot Pot is essentially the meat part of fondue, where you cook your own food in broth, but this was a much larger scale, as you can tell from the picture below. They had everything, meat, seafood, dumplings, veggies, everything.. We were S-T-U-F-F-E-D. 

But, of course, there is always room for dessert. This dinner wasn't actually supposed to be birthday related, but Frank surprised me by getting a chocolate truffle cake from the Mandarin Cafe, a very famous cake shop in Hong Kong. It was better than it sounds! Thanks Frank!

And finally, on Sunday, Drew and I went to our friend Andrew's flat for a Sunday roast dinner followed by a double feature. This actually wasn't birthday related either, but Andrew did such a wonderful job cooking, I wanted to show off our feast. Apparently celebrating for us means eating. We started with appetizers of all sorts of dips, olives, aged beef slices, bree, etc. Then came dinner with roast chicken, roast sweet potatoes, homemade bread!, a greens salad, a couscous salad, gravy, and mozz-basil tomatoes. Wow. Finally, dessert with berry crumble with vanilla ice cream and chocolate chip cookies. It was a blessing we were watching movies afterwards, as I don't think we could have managed anything else. Andrew's apartment is located as close to the water as possible, so his view is stunning.

Better Homes and Gardens, here we come!