Third Birthday Cake In Three Weeks

One simple wish I made for my birthday this year was to have at least a piece of birthday cake. It actually kinda came out of desperation, because I haven't been getting a cake on my birthday for several years already aha wtf! But mana tau, out of a sudden, I got as many as three cakes this year, and the third one came a few days ago. I guess they could have been accumulated from all those years I haven't been getting a birthday cake haha!

Once again, this party came as a surprise. These people just love to surprise me at the times I least expect it.

Kok Hong the chopstick promoter, Shei Pien the cucumber seller, and Kai Cung the apple juice model haha!

Kok Hong has moved in to Chiba as he is now doing his graduate-school studies in Chiba University, in Matsudo campus. He had kept pestering me to have a welcoming party for him for some time already. But due to the recent calamity, the party had to be postponed. Since Shei Pien was down to Tokyo for her job interview last Wednesday, we decided to have a simple welcoming party for him on that night. 

The more people, the noisier it is, right? Haha!

Mian fen gao, by Kai Cung. The ikan bilis was sponsored by Shei Pien haha!

Potato salad with carrots, by Kok Hong.

 I made lor mai kai, which I owed Shei Pien for long time already as I promised her to cook it for her if she gets more than 600 marks in her TOEIC exam.

I knew that Shei Pien made a chocolate cake and was gonna bring it to the party. But never knew it was meant for me. The moment Kok Hong reached my place, he immediately asked for papers and marker pen. He said he was preparing the stuffs needed for the game we gonna play later. He cut a pair of cotton buds into half and coloured it with red markers. I was still clueless on what they were gonna play using all those weird stuff haha! They just asked me to wait and see.

Next, they took those stuff to the kitchen and didn't allow me to follow them back. It just made me more and more curious on finding out what were they up to. A couple of minutes later, the lights were turned off, and they walked in with a chocolate cake with fake candles on it haha wtf! Seriously, I didn't expect that coming at all and that was a total surprise to me.

Chocolate cake made of marie biscuits topped with a strawberry and three fake candles lol!

That's not the most suitable knife to use to cut a birthday cake, but that's the only knife I have at home, and it's also used to cut meat and vegetables haha! 

Multiples layers of the chocolate cake, which also has walnut.

Guess what shape is that? Shei Pien says she purposely drew a rabbit for me, although I think it looks more like Pikachu haha!

A compulsory group photo every time there's a party at my place.

Kok Hong explaining how to prepare the potato salad, which Kai Cung was thinking which lap cheong to steal from the lor mai kai haha!

My birthday present from Kok Hong!

Poor Watson being squeezed by Kai Cung who was in full concentration on his Jenga pieces.

I hope having three parties with three cakes this years doesn't mean that I am older by three years already haha!

We decided to have a second round party on the next day, and this time we had an extra member, Kai Cung's Taiwanese school mate. I've not seen Pei Jing for quite some time already. I think since late last year, which means it has been about four months since we last seen each other. The menu of the night was slightly different from the previous night. Kai Cung made chapati, I cooked chicken curry (but later changed to pork curry because chicken was out of stock haha!) and we had some extra lor mai kai from the previous day.

I think we are just too crazy about apples. That's why we are really good when it comes to talking about Newton's Law of gravity haha!



Our house was turned into a mamak stall, as Kai Cung was busy kneading the dough for the chapati. 



Shei Pien's job was to fry the chapati. How often do you see a girl in suit fries chapati haha!



Food for the night. I added some potatoes and brinjals into the pork curry and I was quite satisfied with the final outcome.



Group photo before we kick-started the party.

I guess I've not seen Pei Jing for far too long already, that we had difficulties when we converse with each other. That always happen whenever the two of us don't see each other for some period of time haha! My Mandarin isn't that good and I cannot mix it with any local words because she wouldn't understand it. So, in the end we would end up having someone else (Kai Cung becomes the victim most of the time lol!) to be our middleman, or we will just talk in Japanese haha!

While we were chit chatting and playing games after the dinner, we were shocked by a strong sudden jolt. It was a magnitude-6 aftershock and continued for quite some time, roughly about thirty seconds. The good thing is that we were in a group so it wasn't that bad. A few aftershocks continued after that but nothing serious happen. Shei Pien, who hasn't been going through this continuous aftershocks thingy (she lives in Kanazawa, which escapes from experiencing the aftershocks most of the time), looked a little bit shocked though haha!

The last time she felt an jolt was on March 11. Yes, the gigantic magnitude-9 quake that shook the whole Japan more than a month ago. She was in Nagoya at that time, sitting for her job interview.

We played few rounds of Jenga after that.

The lesson learnt is that when you are playing Jenga on a carpet, never ever attempt to take the piece on the lowest row. I tried twice and failed twice haha wtf!

So serious and concentrated until tongue also came out lol!

Everyone was bored already, so we used the Jenga pieces to play other stuff, like constructing skyscrapers and domino haha!

I love this shot a lot. Everyone was doing their own stuff.

This is also an interesting shot. I only noticed now that the guys and girls had the same pose.

In other words, it looks like they used their hands to protect certain parts of their body haha! You get what I mean, don't you? 

First Birthday Cake In Japan

I got no less than six unread text messages the moment I turned on my phone on the night I　arrived in Tokyo aｌmost a fortnight ago. All of the messages came from Crystal Mama who wanted to invite us to her belated birthday party last Sunday. A belated one because her birthday fell on mid-March but everyone's attention was diverted to the recent earthquake that hit Japan. We had not much choice but to postpone it.

Mama's place is just a short ten-minute walk from Toyocho Station along the Tozai Line.

It takes approximately forty minutes from my place in Inage to reach Toyocho station, with one transfer along the journey at Nishi-funabashi.

There was one unfortunate story that happened to me when I reached Mama's house. I told this story to everyone who came to the party, and I think I should mention it here too haha wtf! So, I arrived at the ground floor of Mama's apartment and I called Kevin on the phone to ask him to open the automatic door for me. Too bad he was busy doing his stuff and he asked me to call someone else instead. I continued to persuade him to help me open the door, but guess what? He.just.hung.up.my.call!

I thought the line coverage was bad, so I called him again. For the second and third time, he did the same thing to me haha wtf!

Amy doing her usual job, writing names on the paper cups for everyone.

Pyramids of paper cups, beautifully decorated with our names. Although we have double-checked it earlier, we later realised that we left out Andrew haha!

Papa and Mama preparing our lunch.

I arrived at the communal hall and Amy was already there with her friend, Keston. Both of them were having their breakfast and the first thing they asked me was, "Calvin, taken your breakfast? Wanna have some pizza?" At that time, I still didn't know anything about the pizza tale, so I ate a slice of pizza for my brunch.

I later went to see Kevin who was still busy with his book. The book he borrowed from the library was something about "Ways to deceive people" and one of the method is how you can send letters without using postage stamps. I will not write it down here, but to those who are interested to know how that is that possible, do leave a comment and let me know ; )

Soumen (we usually use mee sua in Malaysia) represents longevity, the hard-boiled egg represents fertility (it make sure you will have lots of kids in the future haha!), and the chicken with bone brings hopes that the birthday boy will grow up and be healthy always.

As for Mama and Papa, they were at the kitchen, preparing soumen, cooked in chicken herbal soup with hard-boiled eggs for us. Only later that Mama told us that the party was also to celebrate the birthday of Amy and mine as well. That is why Mama called me earlier that morning to confirm with me if I would be there for lunch as she wanted to prepare the soumen for me.

So sweet of her, isn't it?

Home-made pizza full of cheese topping by Amy and Keston.

Ceaser salad, with parmeson cheese and some other ingredients, which was really good!

Seafood pizza. How many times have you seen photos of pizza in this entry? Actually there are many more, but I think I should limit the pizza photos; otherwise you will be bored to death haha!

Crystal Mama and Amy, just before we had our lunch.

Keston by the way, is the family friend of Amy. After chatting with him for some time, I found out that he is a friend of mine, Kae Vin as both of them are from Jit Sin High School in Bukit Mertajam. The connection doesn't stop there because Keston, who studied in Manipal Medical School in India previously, is also the batchmate of my girlfriend's brother's high school friend, Kok. Confused? Never mind then haha!

Pokoknya, the world is just simply too small haha!

Guess what? They took out this giant cake and I was so surprised to see it. It is so huge that the twelve of us only managed to finish half of the cake.



Kevin doing an aeroplane dance around the cake haha!



Flower bouquet for Mama, from Andrew.



"Friends are family we find for ourselves", taking a nice quote from Amy.



Kevin was just waiting for the right moment to blow our candles haha! He actually blew off the candles and quickly looked at us with an innocent face lol!



Cake cutting ceremony, but I wasn't holding the knife with Amy because if I do so, they said it would look like we were cutting our wedding cake haha wtf!



My piece of cake, and the purple flower looks very happy to see me lol!



With Andrew, who tried to take the cake in one go!



I have learned my lesson and this time, I was extra careful for not going overboard when playing with Kevin. Otherwise, we would sure fight and he might cry again.

The most commonly served dish for the day was pizza, pizza, and pizza. Here is reason behind it. They went to Costco the previous day. It is an American company and is a wholesale warehouse. To get a better idea of this place, just think of Ikea and Tesco and when you combine both of them, you get Costco. They sell everything in bulk and it is a good place to shop when you are having a party, for example.

I was told that the pizza they bought measured three-feet-by-one-foot! The croissant had twelve pieces in one tray! The Campbell mushroom soup came in 1.4L can! Everything came in super big portion, like wanna feed a giant like that haha! In fact, they had difficulties keeping the huge cake in the fridge.

French rusk from Haruyama-san. The one with white chocolate was good, although it was a bit sweet.



Roasted chicken and the croissant.The initial plan was to make sandwiches with them but in the end, we finished up the whole chicken while we chit chat lol!



The girls at the party. Amy, Haruyama-san, Mama and Watanabe-san



A sweet couple. It is a coincidence that both of them were in red; Papa was preparing the mushroom soup and Mama was washing the salad, 
which was super crunchy and sweet.



Kevin with his DIY version of sandwich.



Someone was already in the dreamland after taking some white wine lol!

Thank you to Mama and the rest who had prepared this surprise party for Amy and myself, because this is the first time I blew the candles from a birthday cake in Japan. Although it was a belated one, but it was really sweet of them to hold this party for us. I bet everyone had great fun, surrounded with big cakes, drinks, snacks, pizzas, and spending the whole day eating non-stop until we were bloated haha!

The next meeting shouldn't be too far away because the Golden Week gathering is just a couple of weeks to go.