Dance

I miss dance.  I really do.  I can go for weeks without thinking about it, but as soon as I hear the right music I feel a strong urge to dance.

In college, I did South Indian classical dance (Kuchipudi) every Sunday and went out dancing at least once a weekend.  When I moved to Seattle, I didn't go out much the first year since I didn't have any female friends to go dancing with and I felt awkward going dancing with single guys when I was in a relationship.  By the second year, I had an awesome group of girlfriends and we went out once a month or a little more often, which made a huge difference in my life.  I got to get the dancing out of my system every so often then.

After I got married, the husband and I moved to San Francisco, where we didn't have a lot of friends.  We didn't want to go out clubbing by ourselves, so we only went dancing a handful of times.  We moved again -- to LA -- right after all our friends moved to SF and had dance competitions on the kinect without us.

LA has been even harder, because most clubs are sooo far away and the lines at all of them are so long (I'm just used to getting in free in Atlanta after a max of a 15 minute wait, but maybe things are different in real big cities!).  I almost made it out one night in LA, but we waited in line for over an hour, so we gave up.  Hopefully business school will give me a chance to relive those fun times.

But it's not even clubbing dancing or salsa dancing that I miss.  I really miss Kuchipudi, I miss the occasional Indian dance I did in high school, and I just miss dancing in general.

Maybe I just need more evenings alone when I can dance to the iPod by myself =)

Band of Outsiders

The husband's brother got married recently.  The husband is Indian, and of course so is his brother.  The fiance however, is Chinese-Cambodian, so it was a very interesting mix of cultures.

Two weeks ago was the Chinese-Cambodian wedding in LA, and last weekend was the Hindu wedding in Detroit.  The Chinese-Cambodian ceremony was really interesting.  There were a lot of parallels with Indian weddings, which I found fascinating.  I was still confused most of the time though -- instructions were given in their language, and people were joking around and laughing in their dialect of Chinese.  I had no idea what was going on.  As the husband and I liked to quip, we felt like white people at an Indian wedding.

It was the first time we felt out of place and lost at a wedding.  The most exotic wedding I had been to before this was a Greek Orthodox wedding -- a long way away from Chinese-Cambodian.  The Greek Orthodox wedding was mostly in English, so at least I could follow along.  Anyway, it was definitely a really interesting experience and I have a lot of sympathy for all you white people who felt confused at my wedding =)

Some of the highlights from the Chinese-Cambodian ceremony were:
- The bride's and groom's multiple costume changes.  However, the husband's brother was wearing what looked like a kurta top with a Nehru collar, a gold brocade bottom that looked very Indian, but black socks and clunky black shoes.  The husband joked that his brother looked like he belonged in the era the British raj with that combination.  Although maybe that's not actually funny.
- The bajillion plates of food, including exotic fruits (see below), tamale-type dishes, and desserts

 - The exotic fruits (the rambutan is seen below, but we also had mangosteen and lychee -- by the way, i always associated lychee with the canned stuff sold in Indian stores, which I find too slimy and sweet, but fresh lychee is amazing)

- The breakfast of hot stirfried noodles (made vegetarian for us) with a fried egg and sriracha on top.  The best part of the noodles was the fact that they were being stirfried as we watched, so they were amazingly fresh.
- The Cambodian donuts (or maybe they were Chinese) that tasted like beignets.  I only wish there was powdered sugar to dip them in but Sriracha was as always an undisappointing substitute


Some downsides from the wedding
- As I mentioned before, the fact I was confused most of the time (but maybe that's not too different from the way I am usually)
- The chicken curry.  I thought about trying some to be adventurous, but then I took the lid off the pot and looked in and found myself staring at a chicken foot.  I lost my appetite for chicken after that and went back to the vegetarian dishes.
- Losing my car.  The husband, his dad, our friend Vijay, and I were driving to the reception and we got involved in a 4 car accident on the free way.  We didn't get hit that hard, but our car was smushed at both ends, yielding it inoperable and unsalvageable (Poor car!  My parents gave it to me after I graduated from college and so there's a lot of sentimental value there).  We had an interesting experience though, being the cars causing the traffic rather than the ones stuck in traffic. The upside is the road ahead of us was clear, since we were the bottleneck, so we made excellent time to the reception once everything was straightened out.  The other upside is that the husband and I have to go back to carpooling to work (yay for hanging out an extra 15 minutes each way every day!)

Anyway, that's the end of the long rambling post on the wedding.  I'll write more about the Indian wedding soon =)

Avenge of the Nerds

I like action movies, so when the husband invited me to watch Avengers with his company (they rented out a theater the first day it came out), I agreed to come (not that I really had a choice).  I was even excited, since action movies are fun and I like free stuff.

So the husband and I got to the theater ahead of the bus from the office so we could get good seats, we got some nachos and diet coke, and we were good to go.

And then the movie started.  The first scene opened with Black Widow, and everyone clapped.  Then she went to get the Hulk, and everyone clapped again.  And again and again as each new Avenger was introduced.

Every time something funny happened, everyone clapped.

Every time the Hulk punched someone, everyone clapped.

Every time the Avengers shot down an Norse alien attacker, everyone clapped.

By the end of the movie, I was crossing my arms every time people started clapping.  It got really annoying!  I couldn't hear the dialogue (yes, it's an action movie, and yes, I still want to hear what they're saying).

It was a free movie though... so I suppose I can't really complain :)

Food

I go through phases where I eat out all the time, and then I regress into eating only simple homemade dishes like pasta with marinara sauce, homey Indian dishes, and my personal favorite, mixed vegetables with cheese (no, it's what you think it is -- frozen mixed vegetables with shredded cheese, and of course, lots of crushed red pepper).


I'm trying to get into a phase now where I homecook fancy foods.  I was on a risotto kick for few months recently, and I made a cauliflower puree two nights ago (or if you want to be fancy about it, purée de chou-fleur).  I even found a food blog with recipes for Indian food that I'd previously made only with store-bought mixes (lemon rice is a huge favorite of the husband, and we used our last MTR mix a month ago, so I had to resort to making it from scratch -- it wasn't hard at all, by the way).  And after eating a roasted vegetable quiche from the cafe at work for breakfast, I made a huge batch of quiche with leftover fajita vegetables so I can pack my own every morning.  My crowning glory is homemade lemonade.

If I were a stay-at-home wife in the future, I would start making everything from scratch... bread, jams, crackers, cookies, ice cream.  Sounds like fun... maybe.

Crazy Week

Last week was crazy busy, and I've been busy the last few weeks as well, so I haven't done anything interesting enough to post or had time to post it if it happened.

Things are back to normal, and nothing interesting has happened recently... So I'll try to write something interesting, but I can't promise anything.

The Jason Wu clothes I wrote about in the last post turned out to be an epic fail. The materials felt really crappy and most of it didn't fit well. One dress is almost a keeper -- it doesn't fit perfectly but it's so cute. I still haven't decided whether or not to keep it.

Image from Target

Since the last post, the husband and I took our first trip together to hang out with our friends in San Francisco -- it was our first trip to hang out together with our friends since we moved from SF. It was a lot of fun, and it made us realize that it's hard to recreate that sort of group of friends in LA. We have a lot of history with the people in SF -- Manu's known one of the guys since he was 4, one of the girls since middle school, and another guy (the girl's fiance) for 7 or 8 years. I've known these people since Manu and I started dating, and there's another girl who I've known for 4ish years. It's hard to expect that kind of history when we first move to LA. I think it'll take a few years for us to get to the same point with our friends in LA.

And of course, while in SF we ate a lot of tasty food -- Burmese food, Indian pizza, Chinese food, Israeli food... hard to go wrong with that. I'm looking forward to Vietnamese food during my next trip up there.