Hanging out with Vivian

My lovely friend Vivian has been keeping me entertained and out of mischief these past few days.

Earlier last week she invited me and a few other friends to a Thanksgiving-inspired lunch at her place on Friday. However, on Thursday she found out that she had to work on Friday morning... To cut a long story short, the party was still held and Vivian still cooked but the venue was changed to our place! H had a doctor's appointment in the morning and then took the rest of the day off so he was able to join us too, and K was in his best Charming Little Boy mode. In the end 'our' only other guests were Travis and Mio, but that did at least mean that we could all sit around the table! We had a lovely lunch, and as assistant host I got to keep all the yummy leftovers...

Then today Vivian and I had a booth at an international festival, selling toasted sandwiches. As usual, Vivian did all the hard work (shopping and making the sandwich fillings in advance) and I just showed up. By 3.30 we had sold all 130-odd sandwiches! When we had a bit of free time we checked out the other booths and sampled all kinds of tasty treats - spring rolls, spicy tom yan kun soup from Thailand, Taiwanese sausages, deep-fried bananas from the Philippines and more. Oh, I'm getting hungry again just thinking about it all!

There were also stage performances throughout the day. My favourite was a performance by a Mongolian exchange student who played a traditional 2-stringed instrument called (according to, yup, Wikipedia) a morin khuur. The music was hauntingly beautiful and the range of sounds that such a simple-looking instrument could produce was incredible. At times it was hard to believe that we were listening to just one instrument as it seemed to be harmonising with itself!

Of course, I forgot to take the camera with me today so no pictures I'm afraid. Instead, here's a bit of Youtube morin khuur fun for you (although I think today's was better...). Enjoy!