Asian Day

In college, my roommates and I made up a holiday – Asian Day! To celebrate Asian day, Christa made me a card (which I still have), and we ordered rice with teriyaki sauce at the Teriyaki Stix and ate sitting on the ground around the coffee table – you can’t get more authentic than that! I was reminded of Asian Day when I looked back on what Alex and I did this past weekend…

On Saturday Alex and I woke up at the crack of dawn and drove down to Washington DC for a visit to the temple. We figure it’s the last time for a little while with the baby on her way. It just so happened that the Cherry Blossom Festival was going on downtown, so we jumped on the metro and went to the celebration. There were tons of people there, and we ate some “authentic” Japanese fare for lunch – tempura, pan fried noodles, chicken yakitori, and for dessert (my favorite) manju! We also got to enjoy the arts and crafts displays, and some Japanese dancers and drummers. After that we trekked on down to the Potomac to check out the cherry blossom trees, but were disappointed to find that there were no blooms left. Hopefully we’ll catch them next year.

That night we went to a Phillies game with some friends. The weather was absolutely perfect, and the Phillies beat the Cubs 7-1! And what better way to tie it into our Japanese weekend than by Alex declaring his favorite player on the Phillies as So Taguchi – hailing from Japan. :) It was a great day, but I was exhausted by the end of it!

Continuing with the Japanese themed weekend, we had some friends over and made them miso soup, gyoza (potstickers), and for dessert we had mochi ice cream. Yum!