shabashabu.

Yesterday my roommate Rika and I went to lunch at one of my favorite restaurants in Raleigh, which is now also one of hers and her boyfriend Andy's. As it turns out, they are now regular customers. The place is called ShabaShabu and serves Japanese and Thai. The food is always delicious and the presentation always decorative. I absolutely love Rika. She is so smart and definitely fun to be around, and the conversation over lunch yesterday was unbeatable.
Our service sucked though. Rika asked for sweet tea and got unsweet instead. Then we ordered hard-boiled quail eggs because Rika had made me fall in love with them the last time we went. Apparently, they are a delicacy in the Philippines. The waitress brought us the quail eggs on a tiny plate, eggshell on and the top sliced off. Rika and I look inside the eggs with disgust... this wasn't what we ordered.
We refused to eat raw eggs and turned to our plates and smiled at the colorful array of food before us. We were especially entertained with the snow globe of white rice they provided us with. I immediately attacked my rice with soy sauce, and Rika laughed at me and mentioned that that was how they ate their rice in the Philippines.