happy new year!

we congregated for the surprise party slightly before 9. there was a superabundance of cookies, and a "birthday princess" paper tiara (no sash), and a cake that looked like it had tomato paste for icing. (one of the twins -- he lives in the same house as kinjal, the birthday girl -- nearly ruined the surprise earlier in the day by bursting in on us having lunch, high on painkillers and icing sugar, and announcing that he needed to go and buy eggs.

kinjal: but we still have a few in the fridge.
a.j.: oh! but i don't want to go all the way home.
n.j.: wawa! wawa has hard-boiled eggs.
kinjal: cold, gross ones.
a.j.: i love cold and gross! here i go!

the cake was caramel. the surprise was...more effective than these things usually are, in that the lights stayed off till the right time, and there was a minimal amount of schoolgirl giggling. after that, there was lots of chocolate, and a good time was had by all. much later on, mary (the only other chinese person there) and i started talking about CNY, and how horrible it is to spend it in a place where the crappy cultural steamroller always comes along and squashes the holiday (either that or it gets ignored entirely).

we did decide that the least we could do was eat real food, so the next day we grabbed joe from the ccn (mary's boyfriend) and one of his research assistants, and a bunch of law students, and went to chungking, where they have leng3pan2 and huo3guo1 and a hearty disdain for caucasians. it's a b.y.o.b., but we had all neglected this fact, so no o.b.s had been b.ed, and we decided to send a contingent down the road in quest of pinot grigio.

the food was good, on the most part. the honey walnut prawns were an absolute dead ringer for the salad prawns at swa garden. there was tilapia, which are apparently capable of transitive inference, which is very interesting if you're a cognitive scientist, and also shows that they are smarter than babies. the cong1you2bing3 was too greasy, and also too insubstantial, but it's usually the triumph of hope over experience that makes me order that anyway. there were various vegetarian things, and a huge tureen of suan1 cai4 tang1, and gross dumplings that would have made the baby jesus cry, especially if he had ever gone to margaret drive.

the lawyers were a more interesting bunch of people that you usually get if you put your hand in a barrel and scoop out a fistful of them. larry in particular has had quite a life -- he lived in beijing for several years (and speaks fluent mandarin) before deciding that doing a JD in china was beyond even his linguistic capabilities, and moving back to philly. he is also a big fan of chinese punk rock, which quite frankly i wasn't even aware existed. there were vague threats of karaoke, but despite the wine, cooler heads prevailed, and we were spared that particular ordeal. we didn't once have to talk about my research, which was fantastic, but between the salad prawns and talking about cate blanchett/judi dench i was also reminded one too many times of people i'm not getting to see this CNY, which was not.

nevertheless, happy pig year. be prosperous, as always, and eat without guilt. there will come a time when the goodies will catch up with you, but by then, you'll be too dead to care.