My birthday

My 29th Birthday was Sunday, April 15. To celebrate we had some of our Chinese friends over for diner on Saturday. They cooked a bunch of yummy food and taught me to cook some of the dishes too.

Selena did most of the cooking.

When I've polished off the recipes to include specific amounts of ingredients (instead of "feeling") then I will publish them here. My favorite was the cinnamon braised pork that was seared then done in the pressure cooker for 20 mins. Amazing.

 

Selena at work in the kitchen.

 Playing games while dinner is cooked.

Food. We have top clockwise: fried mushrooms, fried beef with spinach, flash fried spinach with garlic, cumin beef, sweet and sour beef, more beef with spinach, kung pao chicken and in the center is the cinnamon braised pork. It was all very good.

 Licy, Selena, Dragon, Mike, Michal, Ashley, Daniel, AnAn, Susan, Christine, Bella, Yimi.

 The food went fast! It was so good.

Enjoying the yummy food.

 Sheva and Selean. Sheva is Mike's girlfriend. We hope he marries her. We really like her.

 Back for seconds.

 The adorable fabric tulips made for me by Karen, one the gals at the office. Her family runs a shop here in Xiamen and they make and sell all kinds of flower. They are so cute and wrapped in burlap.

The ferris wheel music box that they got for me from Karen's shop. It plays music from the Studio Ghibli movie "Castle in the Sky." If you don't know about Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli, you are missing out. He's done "My Neighbor Totoro," "Kiki's Delivery Service," "Spirited Away," "Howl's Moving Castle," and countless others. His movies are great.

I uploaded a short clip of the the tune and the ferris wheel turning onto my facebook page.
I love it. It will look so cute in my kid's nursery when the day comes. Let's hope that the year of 29 brings just as many happy adventures as the year of 28, but far fewer sorrows.