Soo…I’ve been really busy. Between school, work, and job-hunting, I haven’t had much free time to keep up here, but I’ll try to start writing more again, it’s good for me. And for you.
Friday night, a bunch of us took Yi’s friend from high school out to dinner at Garden Fresh, the vegan Chinese restaurant. Despite it being Friday night, we managed to get a table for our eight person beast of a group, and after we placed our order, the waitress brought out cups of corn soup. FO’ FREE.
I never complain about anything that’s free, and it was super nice of them to just give us eight soups, so it was too bad the corn soup was about as good as this picture turned out - sort of a lukewarm, bland, corn-starchy soup-ish liquid. The last time we came, I had the hot-and-sour soup, which was actually decent, so if you go for a soup, go for the hot-and-sour. Look at me, dishing knowledge left and right. I’ll learn all of you yet.
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Thursday, we moved from our box house to Jerry, so I spent most of Wednesday running around to get everything ready.
One thing I needed was a new duvet cover, so I drove out to Bed, Bath & Beyond, all ready for some crazy bedroom sheet shopping. There was construction on San Antonio Road, so I was already mildly frustrated by the time I pulled into the plaza where BB&B was, and when I got out of the car and realized that I’d left my wallet at home, I screamed to the heavens and did some intense breast-smoting, then went back home to pick up my wallet.
On my second trip to BB&B, I stopped at Rick’s to buy an ice cream to make myself feel better.
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Today, I drove to San Jose to get some recordings for my thesis, which pretty much just involved me playing with adorable Asian children. The little dude who opened the door when I got to the house just went and hugged me right there without even knowing who I was - all together now, AWWWWW. So anyway, that went really well. Yay.
We finished up around 2:30, by which point I was pretty hungry, as the last thing I’d eaten was a freshly baked Milk Pail Market pain au chocolate I’d baked and then burned myself eating at 8:00 that morning, too impatient to wait for it to cool enough to eat safely. Totally worth the burn. (That wasn’t really relevant except as a teaser for the pain au chocolate smackdown post coming soon, in which the awesomeness of the Milk Pail frozen pains aux chocolate will be fully revealed. Get excited.)
Given that I was already in San Jose, home to a huge Vietnamese community, and given that banh mi are one of my favorite things ever (earlier banh mi posts here and here), banh mi for lunch it was. I first went to Than Son Hien Khanh, which I’d read good things about. When I stepped inside, it was packed with hungry Vietnamese people jostling each other to order, which was a good sign, but after several minutes of trying to decipher the menu board (knowing Vietnamese would have come in handy here), it seemed like the main things that they were selling were desserts, and I didn’t see a mention of banh mi anywhere.
Huh.
I am baffled as to why I thought that Than Son Hien Khanh had great banh mi. Reading fail. The desserts looked really good, but all I wanted was a banh mi, so I headed out to find it somewhere else. Right next door was a Lee’s Sandwiches, but, you know, it’s a chain…ehhhh. What to do?? I didn’t have my phone on me to call anyone to give me directions to a new banh mi place, but I figured that if I drove around long enough, I’d find a banh mi shop somewhere. After all, according to a sign on the road, I was in “Little Saigon”.
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