WEEKEND, September 12th-14th
Friday, Shanti is finally available and we can finally go dancing again. It's been a month! It's so great to go dancing again, but boy has this month away made us rusty!
Saturday is nice. We have Babywearing group in the afternoon, and everyone flips out about my fruit salad. They're all commenting on what a good cook I am and how I know "how to make all sorts of interesting things." OK, I did have cream for drizzling on top, and I suppose that makes it more unusual but the person who made most of the comments didn't even know about the cream! Everyone says not to bother trying to complete with local cuisine, that anything you'll make will not be at all exciting to local palates, but I have to disagree. Fruit salad?! One woman was freaking out because her son never eats fruit and he was gobbling it all up, so she was examining the package of cream so she could see what she should buy.
Everyone else generally brings store-bought sweets. Jess has brought durian cheesecake. I don't know how it tastes, because I can't try it, but the smell doesn't exactly entice. I could smell the stink of the famous durian from several rooms away. Peee-yew! George will have to clue you in on how the fruit and the cheesecake taste if he ever posts on this blog again. Come to find out, several of the locals have strong aversions to the "king of the fruits" too. Hunh! It's supposed to be a local delicacy and a regional source of pride, and there are durian fruit farms and fruit stands selling durian all over. But it smells so bad that you aren't allowed to bring it into the hotels. And it's a distinct smell. Imagine an aroma that would be something akin to smelly socks and moldy cheese mixed with just a hint of something sweet like papaya. Blech!
At the group, a few people invite us to a little Mooncake Festival gathering with friends and kids. We're so glad we're invited because we've been asking everyone where we should go to check out Mooncake Festival happenings today and no one has any clue. It's hilarious! But I guess it's more of a personal, family thing. I mean if someone asked me where to go in Denver to experience Christmas Eve/Day, I wouldn't know what to say either.
The evening is nice and cozy; we know almost everyone from Babywearing group, and we all get along great. George and I have been wanting to invite everyone to hang out outside of the group at some point, but we just never have. So, yay!
As far as the mooncake aspect of the evening, we have lanterns and we have a picnic in the dark.
We're supposed to be on a beach, but it's drizzling, so we're all camped out under cover at the marina where one of the couples lives in their boat.
There is also some actual mooncake to eat, but no one notices it among the KFC and fruit salad. So it was sort of a Mooncake-less Festival.
I'm just glad we got to experience this event. George and I have developed a catch phrase for our experience here in Penang. It can all be summed up with: "Something is going on around here that we don't know about." We say this often. It's pretty much the story of our lives here. We're often seeing parades and hearing fireworks, seeing crowds, and cars lined up to go who knows where, and we rarely have any clue what's going on with any of it.
Towards the end of the evening, George made a comment about how we were all a bunch of babywearers and yet none of us were wearing our babies! Within about 30 seconds there were three or four of us whipping out slings and wraps and getting babies tucked in.
This also happened to coincide with our friend Dave's birthday, so we had a little cake & song for that too.
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