LUXOMME

Hot pot is one of those things that you can sit hours for, slowly enjoying the food and the company. It's also a dinner event which forces you into conversations and creates a sharing environment which quickly becomes absolute mayhem. With people throwing ingredients in and people taking them out at the same time, it's messy business, but the more chaotic it becomes, the more relaxing it feels.




For those of you who have never had hotpot, it's essentially Asian fondue, where you put together an assortment of items and cook it as you go. It makes for a long drawn out dinner process where you can sit and mingle with friends for hours.



Typical items include meats, seafood, dumplings, vegetables, and assorted tofu products which you dip into a wonderful concoction of sauces you pre-mix beforehand. It's fun, it's casual and it's personal.






Slowly working our way through the food, we found ourselves left with a ton of leftovers and feeling exceedingly full. The girls moved over to the couches and played TABOO and charades, while the boys stayed on to help polish the last things off.

Between long work days and my need to sleep, I don't get the chance to get people together like this often. In fact, I don't think I've done anything like this since my university days, which seems like eons ago. I was planning on heading back to Hong Kong for CNY this year, and was disappointed when I wasn't able to leave because of work, but I'm glad we were all able to share in this night together.

Despite this being a fun filled month so far, work asides, I'm still not loving February because of the cold. Let's hope it goes by a little quicker.

naomi

While I re-vamped my blog, I worked from my bed. The blogger system is based on templates which are coded, and in order for me to personalize and streamline this blog, it meant that I had to play around with the coding. To a person who has no formal html training, it was frustrating at times, but everything seems to run smoothly now!


I spent most of my afternoon working on refining the coding and finished working out the kinks just in time to watch the sun set.

Lamenting over the fact that the weather right now has dipped significantly compared to the temperature a few weeks ago, and feeling exhausted from a long days of non-stop errands, I decided that it was time to finish it off with a bowl of delicious noodles.


Not wanting to go alone, I texted my friends to see when they would be ready to leave. The girls and I piled up into my car and we drove into the frigid Winter night, in search of something to fill out tummies. We eventually settled on a quaint and cozy restaurant close to downtown.



The three of us ordered a Smörgåsbord of different items ranging from soup noodles, and vermicelli, to salad wraps and steaming hot beef baguettes. 

A beef vermicelli wrap for me, and a pho and vermicelli bowl for the girls!