Reminiscing

A weekend outing to a yet to be determined spot is in the works. In the meantime, I thought I'd catch our many readers (there may be as many of three of you out there!) up on some of our past adventures. (Admittedly, this is an excuse to post more of the pictures we have, which resident photographer Julia started dutifully taking about a year ago. There is no visual evidence of our first year, alas.)

The Time Marta Almost Died

There is no picture of our trip to Hong Kong Palace, but here is a picture of Marta:

This is the delicious soup that saved us from fainting from hunger the first time we went to Bamian.

She looks nice, right? You don't want her to die. But the chefs at Hong Kong Palace clearly had more sinister intentions. The restaurant (which was really excellent aside from the near death experience- you should go!) is located somewhere in the Apocalyptic Seven Corners Intersection of Nightmares in suburban Virginia, and is very difficult to find if you are under the naive impression, as we were, that GoogleMap directions and common sense will get you anywhere in Virginia. When we finally called the restaurant for help from the parking lot of another strip mall, after an hour of making illegal u-turns on all seven of the corners, they said, "You don't have a GPS?!"

When we got there, one of the entrees we ordered was a Tyler Cowen recommendation: Stuffed Pepper Chicken. This consists of chillies, de-seeded and stuffed with sesame seed paste and then deep fried. With deep fried chicken. A little piece of heaven on a plate, really, until you get to a chili that hasn't been de-seeded, but just deep fried, and pop it in your mouth. Poor Marta. She turned an alarming shade of red and I think there were tears and gasping and wincing. I can't really remember because I was still trying to eat the stuffed peppers because, I mean, that was some tasty food. I do remember that she didn't really speak for the next few hours as she tried to quietly deal with her pain. Julia recently went back and had the same dish and and reports that it was delicious.

How We Taught Adam to Point

I mentioned last time that one of the Rules is to have a picture of at least one of us pointing to the sign outside the restaurant, because if we didn't, you might not believe we went there. Plus it is so fun!

This was our second trip for our anniversary.

We found this place due to smartphone assistance, despite my reservations.

She survived and continues to eat spicy food.

The first few times Adam saw us do this, he wandered away and pretended not to know us. Understandable. But he adapted and is now a champion pointer!

Look at that arching!

Now he points at everything!

Adam loves his Inca Cola, Marta gives up.

 In other news, I had an amazing and coma-inducing buffet lunch at Masala Art, one of our Urban Brigade discoveries. Dinner there is consistently good, but for $9.50, this buffet was one of the best price-to-deliciousness-ratio meals I've had in a long time. Also, Julia suggests we go here soon, but Marta claims that it wouldn't count as ethnic food. I think we'll go either way, but: does down home Americana count for our ethnic food brigade? I'm leaning towards yes.