Birthdays During Rotation!
culture  

Birthdays During Rotation!

By Andrew Chan

Hello dear readers (or Kristin who possibly creates the 3,000 web hits this blog gets every month herself, whichever it is). Let’s take a journey.

Long story short, it was my birthday last week. Although it was also rotation. And the first week of classes. But either way, here’s the story of how I spent my birthday.

It starts about as fun as you’d imagine. I had class 10-12, and 2-3. That’s honestly fairly standard if you have a birthday at any time during a week in your four years and Tech.

But it all started getting better after that. Over the last year I’ve worked on and off with Tom Mannion, the senior director of activities and programs at Caltech. I’ve helped him prep meals and work orange out events. So, it was kind of natural that I ended up helping him prep empanadas on by birthday. Honestly, that a perfect way to

But SURPRISE! Tom knew it was my birthday and so we all went out for boba and food! We went to arguably the trendiest boba place in the immediate area: OneZo. Apparently OneZo stands for rabbit and lo and behold they had a plethora of rabbit paraphernalia in the store. So why is OneZo so trendy you ask? They use a machine to cut all of their boba in house. It honestly does make a very big difference in the quality. The boba was the perfect level of chewy. The only issue with their boba was that they drowned it in honey which made the drink just a tad too sweet. Also, their drink menu was very small. But all in all, very solid. 6/6 for the boba, 2.5/4 for the drink for a total 8.5/10. Very respectable. Definitely a must-try for any boba lover.

Dinner was an adventure! We went to my favorite place for dim sum nearby – Full House Seafood and had a Chinese meal complete with Peking duck (possibly my favorite food), fresh fish, lobster, and chow fun (which although they are super American-chinese taste like my childhood).

Oh, and we got softshell turtle soup.

It was actually very tasty, but mentally trying to eat the turtle claw (foot?) was one of the most challenging things I’ve done food wise. And I’ve eaten a lot of pretty wild foods in my lifetime. Either way though, it was a delicious broth and the meat was potato-esque which was a nice complement.

And then we stopped and got a cake too! A completely wild day.

So yeah.

My birthday was pretty amazing.

Fish are food, not friends.

– Chandrew

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