Saturday evening, my friend Craig and his wife came to visit us to return my Yankees baseball cap that I left in their car a couple of weeks ago. Hope that's not the cause of the less than satisfying performance of Yankees these days.
When they arrived, Craig mentioned that they went to the Cupertino Cherry Blossom Festival. Though the entertainments in the festival was fun, they were not impressed with the food served there and were quite hungry. So, I decided to take them out to dinner at one of my favorite place in San Mateo - Santa Ramen, to satisfy their Japanese food craving.
When I first came to California in 2000, I asked some of my Japanese colleagues and friends about the place to have good Japanese ramen. Every single one of them told me that Santa Ramen was the place to be. They said, "even though it is still a bit different, but it's as authentic as it can be in the bay area." Santa was a very small restaurant on 8th St in San Mateo and was always crowded. They closed whenever they ran out of broth, which was usually before 9pm. They served only ramen as the entrees, which came in three choices of broth and several choices of toppings. The food quality was, and is still superb and satisfying. My favorite one is the pork flavor broth with stewed pork topping. The broth is rich but not greasy, the stewed pork is fork tender, sweet and juicy. Usually I'll also enjoy the side of karrage or grilled squid. The only problem I have with Santa is the waiting. The restaurant was so small that you had to wait on the street most of the time. Luckily that they moved to a bigger location in a local plaza about 2 years ago, which provided more convenient parking and more seats.
We had three satisfying bowls of ramen. Mine was pork flavor with stewed pork. It was also the last bowl of stewed pork they had left that day, so I shared half of the meat with my friends. Craig and his wife went for the basic. As for the rice bucket Abby, as usual, a simple bowl of steamed rice plus some karrage would do just fine for her.
After dinner, we went back to my place and played some games. Abby got a Yahtzee set on her birthday and she liked it. We've played a couple of times before. Abby likes it because it is one of the few games that she actually has a decent chance to win fair and square. Yahtzee is a dice game with minimum, but not none, strategy. I've seen people playing it on TV shows, mostly in the bar scene. But I've never tried it until Abby got the set. It was easy and fun. Abby once got 4 Yahtzee's in a game, which got her all pumped up and excited. But not this time. :P
After a game of Yahtzee, we moved onto Blokus, the game that Craig introduced to us a while ago. Craig has a set of Blokus Trigon with triangle bricks, ours is the classic one with square bricks. The games were fun and also proved a point - it's as challenging playing against an expert as playing against a rookie. Abby is like a bad neighbor who just interrupted your strategy with the most non-sense movement that didn't benefit herself at all. Having her bricks getting closer gives everyone alarms, because that before you are aware of it, many of your plans would have been stopped because of that. The unpredictability made Abby the most dangerous player in the game. It also spiced things up quite a bit since others played a bit too nicely without her.
I like the board games and puzzles. But they are usually not as much fun with only two players. So, whenever there are friends visiting, we'd play a round or two. Abby so far has been proven as a mean player in Blokus and Monopoly. :)
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