Have Your Cake and Eat It Too

Today (technically, yesterday) was a day for parties. We did little else but eat, sleep, and socialize. (Well, I had to use the bathroom a lot due to some stomach issues, but maybe that was too much/extraneous information.)

In the afternoon, we attended a lunch birthday party of someone from P. Her husband is in culinary school, so the food was all excellent. It's nice to see coworkers outside of the office, and it was good for Raj to meet them so he could match names to faces. In addition to a wonderful lunch, there were two desserts available - a brownie cake concoction with ice cream and a strawberry chocolate cake. I ended up eating the former and not the latter, although they both looked delicious. Also at this party we ended up stumbling across this golden nugget of information that Keren is going to love - apparently Brazilians are very into something called videoke. That is, it's like karaoke, but there's a video playing in the background for, I imagine, a more rock star like effect? Some of my coworkers want to take me. I have the feeling this could end up tragically embarrassing, but also probably quite fun.

This evening we went to the going away party of one of Raj's friends from I. As we were walking from the car, there ended up being an impromptu capoeira performance on the street - a few guys with instruments started playing, and the others started doing all these crazy stunts. We got a few blurry, poorly lit pictures which I will post soon, I swear. Anyway, it's always funny going to these math crowd parties, especially being the half-mathematician that I am. Things are much better now that I have some sort of daily job-like occupation, though. There was actually non-awkward small talk to be made with people I didn't know. Dessert-wise, there ended up being chocolate cake and a pineapple cake, and then there was chocolate mousse - all of these were handed to me, so I didn't have too much of a choice of whether or not I was going to eat it. Jesus. By the time I was given the mousse, I could only manage one bite, despite all the starving people that surely suffered because of my food-wasting. And we started the day with strawberry pancakes with ice cream! Too much sweet, especially bad since you can only wear bikinis on Rio beaches.

On the way to and from the party, we were driving along the beach. The waves were huge tonight - watching them crash onto the shore with the white foam and the black sky was beautiful and mildly terrifying, even though I think to most Cariocas it's nothing special. As much as I love Michael Stipe, I don't think I'll ever be brave enough to swim in the ocean at night. (Ten points for anyone who understands that reference.)

Now Raj is watching Chappelle Show, and I'm going to go to sleep. Seriously, what is with men? Why do all of them seem find this show so hilarious? Ridiculous.