This weekend was wild.

Friday night sorta disappears into a haze. I think we stayed home and cleaned, and did some planning for Saturday.

Saturday morning I went to work to teach the SAT class. I raced back home to find Jodi up and cleaning the house. Immediately, we left and went to the market to buy veggies, fruit, and sugar/yogurt/stuff at the grocery store. Arriving back home at 12:30pm, we cleaned and baked straight up till the start of the potluck party. Guests started arriving at 4:30pm or so, and we ate at 6:30. The table was full of yummy stuff: banana bread, Japanese curry, potatoes-and-green-beans, guacamole pasta salad, Thai fruit salad, fried shrimp, Malaysian coconut beef, fish wraps, "ancient" pork with pineapple... and a not-so-successful pineapple upside-down cake. For drinks I made a sherbert punch that was "better than McDonald's 麦乐香" according to one guest, yogurt, and coke. After eating we played "Eat Poop You Cat" and Person-Time-Place-Activity. At that point, the non-English speaking guests bowed out so the left-overs broke out the Scrabble game, and snacked on coffee and biscotti. We chatted until midnight or so.

On Sunday Jodi and I got up early, ignored the mess in the living room and kitchen, and took a taxi out to 七宝 (Qibao), a suburb of Shanghai with a longer history than the city itself. After meeting with a business contact, we had some extra time so we ate Guilin noodles and milk tea on some tables that McDonalds put out on the street in front of their shop, because it was a gorgeous day. Then we walked down to Qibao's "Old Street" area, a historical district filled with a bustling Sunday crowd that competed to taste local treats like "soup balls" (rice dough balls filled with peanuts, crushed black sesame seeds, or jujube paste) and 海棠糕 (crabapple cake). After a walk through the on-site temple and a climb up the pagoda, we took off for a dinner date in Pudong with a colleague from my new job. We didn't get back home till 11pm.

When I get home from work today, we still have a party mess to take care of.