Celebrations

I have a few anniversaries to celebrate in a year and today marks the second oldest, first being my birthday, of course!

It was today, twelve years ago, that I decided to give in to an endearing dude's ('the hubs') persistence and said yes to dating him ('first contact'). Of course, in the months that followed, dating him wasn't as easy nor inexpensive as most couples would expect. See, he lived over 5200kms away from me. So the "Hey, babe, how about catching a movie this weekend?" thing didn't work quite so well. I wasn't going to pay over a thousand dollars to watch a movie, which included a total of 14 hours on a plane and a passport and neither was he. Not that we were tight with money, but it doesn't make sense to be spending that amount of money for a movie, right? But we did make the most of our time together whenever he came over for a vacation or I went over for one. Needless to say, it was an expensive year of dating.

Over the years, we make it a point to have a nice meal in a nice restaurant on our 'first contact' anniversary (and almost all our other anniversaries) and after tonight's dinner we realised that we have to be in the mood to celebrate (this is what getting older does to you). We tried a new Japanese Restaurant, Ippudo, after reading a couple of rave reviews and was sorely disappointed with the meal itself. Yes, the location is great, the deco made the place look expensive (chandeliers, a wall of various bowls, muted colours), but with customary shouts of welcome and thank-you-good-bye from the serving staff in Japanese, basso nova music playing in the background, idle chatter from customers... it comes across as an upmarket Japanese bistro. An expensive bistro serving unslurpable Ramen. Looks like we're not going back there!

The next anniversary will be the day we got engaged which so happens to be Valentine's day and this year's Lunar New Year so happens to fall on that day too. We usually do a home cooked western meal as we agree on not succumbing to inflated restaurant prices but this year will be different.