Halloween Weekend

With NSF's due date coming up very soon and the election, I forgot to talk about my Halloween "celebration". I didn't actually celebrate anything - I didn't have a costume and I didn't even have any decorations (which is very odd for me because usually I decorated the heck out of my dorm room for a holiday). But I got to hand out candy for about 10 groups of children who knocked on my door, so it was exciting to be the treat-giver :).

Sergio also came to visit me last weekend. He came on Halloween night, so I picked him up from the airport. Once we got to my house, I gave him a short tour of my little house (short because it's so small) and invited him to eat my pumpkin cheesecake. The cheesecake was really hard to make well since I didn't have an electric blender, so my cake wasn't very homogeneous. But it tasted good anyway!

It didn't taste very cheescake-y, nor did it taste very pumpkin-y, so I'm not exactly sure what to call it.

Anyway, we went around Seattle and visited some of the tourist sites, like the Space Needle and Pike's Place Market. I got to play around with Sergio's spiffy DSLR, so that was fun. We also went to see the Fremont Troll (at the intersection of N 36th St and Troll Ave N) that was under the Aurora Ave N bridge. We couldn't get a good picture of it because so many children kept climbing on it, but here's me on the troll's shoulder:


We ended up hanging out with Aseem on Saturday night. We played Road Rash on N64 (yes, rather old-school), and Guitar Hero on the Wii. Aseem's pretty good at playing really hard songs... I thought he was going to break the keys on the guitar.

On Sunday, Sergio and I went to the Woodland Park Zoo to visit the animals. I took some nice pictures of the animals (which I'm posting on Facebook). For some reason, a lot of the animals had pumpkins with them (I guess for Halloween):

After the zoo, we went back to Fremont to try out a Taco del Mar. Sergio wanted to try it out since we kept passing them and he probably misses eating Mexican food (Seattle has more Mexican food places than Boston does... surprisingly). The Taco del Mar we visited looked kind of sketchy, so we decided to look around to eat somewhere else. We encountered the Fremont Sunday Market, which had a little stand that was selling tacos and tamales. We ate a couple tacos and a tamale from there, and because Sergio started talking to the guy at the stand in Spanish, we got a free rice drink too. The drink was made of rice (tapioca maybe?) and cinnamon. It wasn't that bad and it reminded me of something I've had before... but I can't remember what it is.

The weekend was fun while it lasted and I'm sad Sergio had to go back to Boston :(. I'll be visiting him during December, and luckily, Mavis is visiting too. We can have a little MIT reunion :).

And I just read the comment on how the smitten "kitten" website is actually smitten "kitchen". Hm, I wonder why I thought it said "kitten"...