My Week of Thirty

The process of turning 30 has been a long, gradual one. Well, come to think of it, I suppose all in all it took 30 years, but I was referring just to the birthday part.

Friday: a double-birthday-plus-housewarming party hosted by a friend and co-worker, replete with a shot-glass roulette wheel, countless baijiu toasts, an icing fight (I'm the blurry dude in the photo), and drunk fun with fireworks. Afterwards we went to the Melting Pot, where we had the second food-fight of the night. This time it was peanuts. ("Thank you all CHILDREN for throwing peanuts at me. I felt so loved! and I found a few in my bra when I got home last night. HOW WONDERFUL!!!!" — anon.) I ended the night with a vodka martini that was not really recognizable as a vodka martini but was still sufficient to knock me on my ass.

Monday: two of my favorite things in Shanghai. Dinner at Korean barbecue at Ben Jia, one of the very few non-Chinese restaurants here where quality is on par with what you can get in the US. Afterwards, Belgian brews at Kaiba, a malty, hoppy oasis in the Shanghai beer desert which teems with Budweiser and Tsingdao (a.k.a. Chinese Budweiser) and Harbin (a.k.a. northeastern-Chinese Budweiser).

Yesterday: Another (much smaller) birthday dinner at Noodle Bull, which has cheap and excellent hand-cut Taiwanese-style noodles, and also one kind of broth that takes shockingly like my mom's beef soup, although my favorite is the spicy-sour flavor. Of course, my favorite flavor of anything is the spicy-sour flavor.

Today: Completely unrelated to my 30th birthday, I had a very rare treat, a good Italian meal in Shanghai: pappardelle in lamb ragù at Issimo. The noodles were fresh and pleasantly bite-y, and the ragù was luxuriously lamb-y, and it was served with actual Pecarino Romano and not that crap in the green plastic bottle. Shanghai is chock full of mediocre Italian food, so I have mostly avoided it since moving here, but this place was actually worth going back to.