5-22-2011

Yesterday's festival was so much fun that we decided to go to more. Today is the Hessler Street Fair which I was pretty sure would be a People Zoo. I like going places to watch people. These are some of my favorite people. I think this is what happened to Guile from Street Fighter II. This guy in a pepper costume was actually really good at his job. He convinced me to go see this guy and look at their pepper plants. I'm now the owner of a Orange Thai pepper plant that I named Pepper Pots. After buying Pepper Pots, this guy was a good indication of where we were going next.

Now there's no such thing as an "every type of central European country put together festival" for Nicole (well, maybe there is, but it would pretty much just look like Ohio). So we also went to the Asian Festival to celebrate my heritage and traffic cones. There are lots of Asian people in Ohio (or that umbrella just just saying hello in Japanese). In addition to real Asian people, this was also an excellent opportunity for non-Asian people to wear ridiculous hats and participate in traditional Asian activities like sumo wrestling, standing in tents and smacking each other in the face (note facial hair), video games that involve synchronized dancing, dressing up like this, and of course the Chopstick Challenge. I love my culture. We also to got to go shopping in fun stores that sell dolls of Nicole and I. Actually, I really love shopping in stores like this because it reminds me of being a little kid in Chinatown in New York. My mom would always buy me these Chinese slippers every time we were there. I would wear them until they fell apart back home, then need a new pair the next time we went to visit. I always got the plain black ones (Bruce Lee style), but Nicole got embroidered ones with colors. We also shopped for other great markers of my cultural heritage like the cardboard take out container and the roasted ducks that scare white people. Now I grew up eating said ducks and think they're creepy, but delicious. I'm unfamiliar with this squid on the other hand and just think he's creepy. Finally, blending my two loves of Asian things and ice cream (really, dude...I'll be in rehab/fat camp by the end of summer), we got Mochi. These are little balls of ice cream stuffed inside rice dough stuff. Rock on.

After a full day of adventuring, we returned home to tend to my pepper plant. I bought it a house at an Asian grocery store, but it didn't have holes in the bottom and the guy at the garden center said that it would drown Pepper Pots and kill her. So I broke my Dremel Tool and saved her life. See, holes! While at the garden center, I also bought a habanero pepper plant and named it Iron Man (yes, I know I'm wearing a wifebeater and cut off jeans...don't judge me...I'm "gardening"). Now safe in their new homes on my front steps, please meet Pepper Pots and Iron Man. We'll see how many days they last before my bad gardening skills kill them.

After all my hard work shoveling dirt, we were very hungry for the collection of instant noodles we bought today. Mushroom picked which one she wanted to eat, and we made noodles with dried pork for Nicole and kimchi for me (we each bought buckets of said toppings today). The real best thing about Asian culture is the food.