My First Seattle Birthday

Zoe is such an amazing animal that she flew all the way from St. Louis just for my birthday party. What a trooper.

We headed to the International District for what I think was an unseasonable Lunar New Year celebration. I think I heard it was postponed from its original date for covid reasons.

You can see a little lion dance parade thing happening back there. The goodest of luck was befalling us today.

I couldn't resist this gigantic bowl of grass jelly with taro balls.

There was a McDonald's food truck on hand passing out free french fries. Yes please!

Messy

We had some boba tea at TP Tea. This turned out to be a mistaken life choice, as I had already eaten about ten pounds of a weird jelly and balls mixture.

We did a fun tour at Theo Chocolate. We learned that the name "Theo" comes from the plant species they use to make the chocolate: Theobroma cacao.

We ate a lot of chocolate in this room overlooking the factory.

Our guide showed us that this chocolate had been made incorrectly. Chocolate is a mixture of a few ingredients, including sugar and fat, that can separate if the humidity or temperature isn't correct during production.

The giant Statue of Lenin in Fremont was all decked out in Ukraine colors today. Very fashionable of him.

We had some Dumpling Tzar nearby to round out our ruskie experience.

I laughed out loud when I saw this sign advertising the wonders of Northwest Arkansas. Fool me once, shame on you!

We had a pretty good turn out at my birthday party. The first stop was Unicorn.

They had a ridiculous hat for birthday boys to wear. I also dusted off my sparkly jacket from New Year's Eve right before the end of the world.

It was definitely a unicorn horn and not shaped like any other thing.

Unicorn was featured in Macklemore's "Thrift Shop" music video.

Seattle's Best Karaoke is questionably named, to start with. The rooms were like office meeting rooms, and the sound system was janky as well: pretty much a computer from someone's dorm room. The one large plus in its favor was that the place was BYOB.

There was show tunes singing

Afterwards most of our guests went home, we hit a couple more bars, then we went home.