Today was a really great day. I actually did a significant amount of work today, which felt really good. I had lunch with some of the expats from India; I've really missed the cameraderie of the expat group, and our lunch date felt like we were reclaiming it, if only for an hour. I left work around five so that I could clean up the apartment a bit. Faced with the complete disaster that is our living room, I gave up almost immediately. John came down from Berkeley, and he, Claudia, and I had dinner at Mango Cafe in Palo Alto. It was the first time that I'd seen him since that memorable evening at Lucky Dhaba almost two months ago, so it's fitting that the restaurant wasn't one of my favorites :) Mango Cafe definitely isn't a bad place, and the food was 'aiite', as Vidya would say, but it was slightly too reminiscent of Indian food, what with the roti bread and the chickpeas, and so I wasn't in the right mood for it. Also, allow me to say that Mango Cafe in Palo Alto may look like one of the city's less well-decorated restaurants, but it's a huge step sideways from the Mango Tree restaurant in Hampi, India. I can't really say that one restaurant is better or worse than the other, but they occupy completely different planes of space, time, and taste. Mango Cafe is a Jamaican restaurant where you can eat anything and drink the water without worrying about getting typhoid. Mango Tree is a cafe actually set up under a mango tree on the banks of a river outside of Hampi; we thought we were going to get killed there when our driver took us to a complete dead end after driving miles across a bumpy dirt road, then told us to get out and walk a quarter of a mile up this small, wooded path that seemed to be straight out of 'The Jungle Book'. The restaurant ended up being at the end of the path, in the middle of nowhere, and they served the best Chinese-style noodles that I had anywhere in India. Crazy! Overall, I preferred the Mango Tree to the Mango Cafe, even though Mango Tree is in an area we lovingly christened 'the killing fields', while Mango Cafe is in a highly respectable neighborhood in one of the most expensive areas of the United States.
Anyway, enough about that. We came back to our place and hung out for awhile; then, Vidya, Sri, and Adit showed up to partake of the banana bread that Claudia baked for dessert. It was extremely tasty, and the company was swell. Hanging out with friends is lovely, especially when those friends are being subjected to the smelliest cheese ever created. John brought me some tete du moine (aka 'head of the monk'), which we had occasionally bought and savored during college; we both really like it, but it was apparently appalling to virtually everyone else there. Vidya almost threw up after she tried to eat most of her piece in one bite (it's only good when eaten v. slowly), and Sri was quite unhappy that his fingers reeked of tete du moine. I sent half of it back home with John, since there's no way I can eat it all by myself; the rest of it is triple-wrapped with Saran wrap and enclosed in a sealed Ziploc bag in the refrigerator, in hopes that it will not destroy the delicate atmosphere of the apartment over Christmas. Mmm, cheese.
It's really hard to believe that I've known Adit, Claudia, and John for over six years. Sometimes I feel like I've changed a lot in those six years, and other times I feel like I haven't changed at all. Tonight was one of those 'haven't changed at all' nights, but at the same time we all have changed in subtle and sometimes unexpected ways. Luckily those changes haven't rendered friendship impossible; regardless of how long I go without seeing my core group of friends, that bond is still there. That's an extremely comforting thought, even if I don't necessarily want to put those bonds to the test.
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