November 1, 2008
The past few weeks have been full of various parties. Mostly "good bye" parties because my 3 main American friends all returned to American in the past week. My roomie left and now I'm in the apartment by myself. Before she left, I took her out for lunch. Because it was her last meal in the city we ate the popular dish of this region; snail soup. We both actually like this dish a lot, and it doesn't usually have snails in it. It's really noodle soup with various veggies in snail-flavored broth. It was a fun way to send her off to her home in Texas - where she will not be able to find that dish anywhere.

My friends, "the married couple", left a few days after my roomie. Before they left, they gave away a ton of their stuff to friends in the city. One of the many goodies I got from their give-away pile was a little plastic toy of the Mr.Burns character from "The Simpsons" cartoon. He had a little button you could push and his voice would say his trademark line; "excellent".

The married couple joins me in my appreciation of the comedy TV show; "The Office." One aspect of that show is a prank one of the characters likes to pull, where he takes other people's stuff and then puts it in a Jello mold for them to find later....    My friends thought a good way to say "goodbye" to me was to replicate this prank with the Mr.Burns toy they gave me. Unfortunately I didn't find the Jello mold in the back of my friend until a week later. Once I found it I tried to eat the toy out of the Jello, but after a few bites I gave up....
My teacher, Rose, was at my house and we enjoyed the joke and our good friend's sense of humor together. It took some explaining to Rose as to why they put the toy in Jello...
    
   

My friend, Lucy, turned 30 this past week. I really wanted to have a birthday party for her but she didn't have any free time for that, so we had a small party together when she came over to my apartment for class on Tuesday. I made her birthday brownies and we had a great time together. I even got to re-use my musical birthday candle!