Asian snacks -- Kiwi gummies

Kasugai is a pretty well-known Japanese candy company that makes tasty gummy candies. I bought these for my sister (we exchange these Japanese gummies a lot for some strange reason) and I had to sample them to make sure they were OK (hehe). I really liked these kiwifruit gummy candies -- they tasted like juicy kiwis and even had little kiwi seeds dispersed throughout the gummy matrix of the candy! I've tried many other Kasugai gummy flavors (e.g. peach, lychee) and they are all really well-made and delicious. I will have to get more of these when I see them!

Asian snacks -- Green tea sandwich creme cookies

For today's Asian snack installment, I will talk about green tea-flavored cookies. These were very pleasant with sweet green tea cream sandwiched between two butter cookies. I really love green tea (especially green tea ice cream!) and I think that these cookies do a good job of balancing the grassy taste of the tea with enough sweetness.

Miami Metro Zoo

Woo-hoo -- last Saturday, Carlos and I went to the zoo and became members so that we could go all the time! The zoo is only about a 20-minute drive south of where I live, so it is very convenient to visit and is one of the best zoos around (on a similar scale with Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle).

We arrived right at 9:30 am when the zoo opened to try and beat the heat and crowds of the afternoon. Among the first animals we saw was an Aracari -- a congener of the species Carlos and I wrote a paper about!
Pteroglossus viridus

An Amazon forest-themed exhibit just opened in December and that was what I wanted to spend the most time at this day. The Amazon Exploration exhibit was excellent! They had different sections depending on forest type (flood forest, cloud forest, pantanal) and so many cool animals from the Amazon -- this was great. One of the forests even focused on a story about an agouti -- finally people are giving agoutis the respect that they deserve!

Giant river otter : Pteronura brasiliensis


Unknown bird in the Amazon forest exhibit


Blue poison-dart frog : Dendrobates azureus


Harpy Eagle : Harpia harpyja



Agouti : Dasyprocta sp.

After spending most of the morning in the amazon, we ate lunch then ventured into Africa. By this time it was getting really hot and sort of crowded so we wandered back to the entrance. But, before we left, we decided to feed the giraffes at the feeding station and this was a lot of fun -- you can pet them and feel their tongues as you feed them lettuce!

Okapi : Okapia johnstoni


Me feeding a hungry hungry giraffe

We are planning on coming back this weekend to see all the Asian animals that we missed last time. The Miami Metro Zoo is huge and full of great exhibits and animals. I am very excited to have my membership pass so that I can go as often as I want!

Asian snacks -- Fruitery Jellies

For today's Asian snack review, I will talk about Fruitery Jellies -- a gelatin-like substance made from the plant Amorphophallus konjac. I have liked these konnyaku jellies ever since I was little. My friend would bring these (thought not this brand) in her lunch and share them with me. These jellies are slimy, sweet little fruit-flavored treats. These snacks used to be smaller and more cork-shaped, but people would choke on them so konnyaku jellies are now made in larger, less easily choked on sizes.

The Fruitery Jellies I got from Uwajimaya didn't come in as many flavors as I'd hoped, but all tasted familiar. I sampled pineapple, apple, and grape. Not as good as other types of konnyaku jellies I've had, but not bad!

Asian snacks -- Cream Collon

While I was home in Washington for Christmas, my mom, Carlos, and I managed to brave the ice and snow to visit one of my favorite stores -- Uwajimaya. Uwajimaya is basically a huge Asian market with lots of fresh food (seafood, produce, and little food court), Craft supplies, trinkets, and lots of grocery items. Of course, whenever I visit, I stock up on Asian snacks. Since I took pictures of all the snacks I got, I thought I would write a little about each one in "Asian snack-themed" posts -- I love snacks...probably more than meals!


To start, here is one of my favorite cookies -- Cream Collon. Despite the weird name, these tubular vanilla cream-filled cookies are delicious. They have crunchy cookie outsides filled with fluffy vanilla innards. I always get these if I see them in stores. I think there are other flavors of Cream Collon (like chocolate) which I haven't tried, but are probably just as delicious as the vanilla flavor.

Herb garden

Last weekend Carlos and I stopped by Home Depot and picked up all the required supplies to construct an herb garden for our balcony. I've wanted to grow herbs for a long time and now we finally have some! We scavenged some window boxes from the campus greenhouse (leftovers from someone's experiment), bought some soil and plants, then planted everything and voila -- instant greenery!

We have 3 pots full of herbs sitting on our balcony railing now. Here are the herbs we have: two chives, one basil, one rosemary, and two arugulas. They all look very healthy and happy and I can't wait to start using them in our meals.

Evening at the Kampong

This event actually happened about a week ago, but I only downloaded my pictures today so now I can finally post about it!

As a volunteer with the Gifford Arboretum (the arboretum on campus here at UM), I and a few other biology grad students attended the annual presentation of the Fairchild Medal at the Kampong. The Kampong is a beautiful garden and headquarters for the National Tropical Botanical Garden. The Fairchild Medal is an award given out every year to an esteemed botanist who has excelled in the field of plant exploration, investigation, and collection. The event is really fun (I've gone twice before) and the grad students were bartenders for the evening. We got to eat free snacks, drink wine, and watch the award ceremony and speaker's talk. Overall, a pretty fun evening!

Gainesville

We spent two nights in Gainesville prior to arriving in Miami to visit with a few of our friends that live there and are grad students at University of Florida. I really love the UF campus -- the library is amazing, there are lots of natural areas, and there are diverse things to see and do there. My favorite place on campus is the Natural History Museum.

The UF Natural History Museum is fantastic and free if you are a student (though I usually donate some money for admission). I especially love the evolution area exhibiting the skeletons of many extinct animals along with artists’ renditions (paintings and sculptures) of these fauna. I have only been there three times, but every time I want to see the butterfly exhibit (a big area where the butterflies fly around freely) and it is raining -- so no butterflies will be flying! One of these days I will see it, but there are plenty of other well-done exhibits to see.

After spending the day seeing the museum and walking the campus, we attended a lecture in the zoology department and after that all of us grad students got together at a local hang-out called Top. This was a quintessential graduate student bar/restaurant which was really cool and reminded me of places around UW in Seattle. I ate some delicious (though weird-sounding) creamed-corn fritters there -- apparently they are a Top specialty.

After our stay, Carlos and I traveled the few hours south to Miami and settled into office living until we found our apartment. We are still contending with reverse culture-shock, but we are getting settled in and working hard. I had a really fun and adventurous Christmas vacation this year!

Road trip

After our fun stay in Las Vegas, Carlos and I set out for the open road. We ended up traveling through Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida after leaving Las Vegas and the trip was actually a lot easier than I anticipated. I really enjoyed the scenic desert lands that we traveled through in Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. The bayous and swampland in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama were also very pretty. We frequently stopped at rest stops for bathroom and leg-stretch breaks and some of them were really nice!

We had beautiful, sunny weather throughout our drive and made it back to Miami after 6 days. We did spend one full extra day in Gainesville, Florida to visit friends, see the University of Florida campus, and look around at the museum -- but that will be in the next post!

Vegas adventure -- Part 2

After two somewhat harrowing days on the road (the mountains in Oregon were particularly traumatizing), my mom, dad, Carlos, and I arrived in Las Vegas to visit my sister. Carlos and I stayed with my sister again while my mom and dad stayed in a super-deluxe-fabulous suite in the Paris (which was really, really cheap since we were there in the lowest of the low season -- woo-hoo!).

Some highlights of the trip included:
• Meeting up with my friend Christina from college one afternoon (after not seeing each other for 5 years!)
• Zooming up to the top of the Stratosphere just before sunset and staying there until after the sunset to see the strip at night (great views)
• Beating the house (I came out $1.25 ahead!)
• Getting a behind-the-scenes tour of the pastry kitchen in the Paris (compliments of my sister)
• Eating 5 free fancy French desserts from the Paris café from the chef for Carlos’ birthday
• Finding a Dippin’ Dots store and having root beer-flavored ice cream of the future


I had a really fun time in Las Vegas with my family! My mom and dad flew back to Washington the day before Carlos and I hit the road back to Miami. More on that road trip in the next post!

Christmas in Washington

After our little pre-vacation vacation in Las Vegas, Carlos and I arrived in Seattle on the night before Christmas. The weather was still really horrible, so we relaxed with my mom and dad at home for most of the time that I was in Redmond. The snow was the most I think I had ever seen in Washington and it stuck around for the whole remainder of the time we were there.

While at home I played Wii (yay, I got it from Santa Claus), ate delicious food, and played with Remington (or Remlington as I like to call him). He is really nice and loveable despite some bad habits and he really reminds me of Sierra -- which makes me both happy and sad. This was the first Christmas I had at home since all the animals were gone and I really missed them a lot.


My mom, Carlos, and I ventured out to go to Uwajimaya to buy Japanese snacks and Crossroads mall for lunch. We ate at a really nice little Pho noodle place and then wandered around Half Price Books for a while. We weren’t able to get to Seattle (we planned on visiting the zoo and I was going to meet my friend Molly in Capitol Hill) due to the weather, but I will probably be back in town this summer for my high school reunion.


I had a nice, though slightly shorter than anticipated, time in Washington with my family. From there my mom, dad, Carlos, and I piled into the car with all our stuff to drive down to Las Vegas to meet up (again for Carlos and me!) with my sister for a belated Christmas celebration.

Las Vegas adventure -- Part 1

I finally had some time to download all my pictures from the past couple of months. Thus will begin a little retroactive blogging about all my adventures from the end of December until my arrival back in Miami.

Carlos and I flew out of San José, Costa Rica on 21 December. Our flight plan to return to Washington included stops in Phoenix and Las Vegas (with about a 5 hour layover in Vegas). However, due to the intense and uncharacteristic snowfall and freezing weather that hit Seattle during that time, we got stuck in Vegas. We ended up having an unexpected stay in Las Vegas with my sister (who luckily lives there and had a really nice place for Carlos and me to stay!) before visiting my parents in Washington.

We had about 4 days in Las Vegas with Shannon (but without access to luggage which somehow made a magical flight to Seattle in the bad weather without us). We spent our time relaxing, wandering the strip, and hanging out with Shannon on her days off. This layover was actually very fortuitous since I go to spend time with my sister who I hadn’t seen for 2 years!

We visited the Luxor first (formerly my favorite hotel, but now it’s kind of sad and lame). From there, we went to the Coca-cola museum/store where Shannon, Carlos, and I shared one of the International Coke Product samplers: 16 different drinks from around the world. Most of the drinks were pretty good -- except for the bitter one! From there, we walked to the Planet Hollywood (formerly the Aladdin) and the Paris.


On another night, we visited In-N-Out Burger for dinner (yea!) and saw the Christmas decorations in the atrium of the Bellagio. We stayed for the fountain show and walked to Caesar’s Palace.


I really liked hanging out with my sister at her place (she has a really nice apartment) and playing with her little kitty named Daphne. Though shy at first, Daphne is a really friendly and slightly evil cat who likes to gnaw on fingers and sleep under the bed.


After our slight delay in Las Vegas, my sister dropped Carlos and me off at the airport on the night of 24 December so that we could fly off to Washington. One perk of our delay was that they put us in first class for the trip -- woo-hoo!