The Family O' Blevins

Chloe is getting good at the rolling over bit, but only if the arm on the side that she's rolling toward is stuck under her. It's been an interesting few days since you last heard from us.

We've been eating out a lot, since eating out costs roughly the same as staying at home. Plus, it's kind of hard to cook here. We've only got a small electric hotplate, and it's a bit hard to find things that we know how or want to cook. There are a lot of restaurants in the vicinity of the apartment. We've had some good and bad experiences. Ordering at most places is kind of like Russian roullette, except that the gun is about half-loaded with different kinds of bullets: way too spicy, way too odd, way too unidentifiable, way too old, or way too not for a Westerners' pallet (p.c. for gross.) The other half is totally delectable. We've found about three places nearby that are consistently good. The most entertaining place is about a 10 minute walk toward the Renmin University, which is quite close. It's a hotpot restaurant. If you're unfamiliar, hotpot restaurants have a single burner in the center of every dining table, where they put a big pot of broth, which can come as spicy, sour, and so on. Then you order stuff to put in the hotpot, raw meat, veggies, tofu, etc., and you cook it all right there. At a lot of restaurants they have a greeter outside the restaurant who tries to lure you in and then escorts you. The greeter called in reinforcements and about three people clung to Chloe's stroller while they herded us onto the elevator up to the restaurant. I think every server in the whole restaurant at some point came by to take care of us, including the owner. A swarm of about five servers hovered around us for the first ten minutes or so, and after that we got a visit every thirty seconds or so. Eventually, they only came by every few minutes.
Ethan can't read the menus very well, but fortunately he caught the character for brain next to the pig character before he ordered it. The owner visited us a few times too and gave Katrina a fragrance bag as a gift for coming. As we left, she pushed Chloe's stroller to the escalator while a vanguard of bouncing waitresses followed behind us. Katrina commented after we left that if there was an emergency she was going to come right away to that restaurant, and she was sure they'd take care of her.
Unfortunately, our first major food tragedy occurred on Valentine's day. We've been getting cheap breakfasts from a nearby vendor who makes these tasty little egg crepe thingies. But on V-day morning one of them made Katrina sick, so we spent Valentine's Day laid up in the apartment. We ordered Papa John's for V-day dinner, which was surprisingly good. Katrina's feeling a bit better now.