Winter Break: Coming Home

The past winter break was the most I had looked forward to something in a while.

If you had heard me any day last semester, you probably would have heard me saying something along the lines of how excited I was to go home. My borderline complaining only got worse as the semester went on, especially when Thanksgiving break hit and basically everyone went home.

So, when I finished my last work shift of the semester on Wednesday of finals week (and also when my mom moved my flight earlier), I was more than eager to pack my bags to go home the next day.

Going back to Seattle was more relaxing than I thought. Throughout the 7 hours it took to get back, I wasn’t thinking about anything difficult or stressful; I put my earbuds in and zoned out while thinking about how much fun I had last semester, as well as how much fun I was about to have over break.

And I did in fact have a lot of fun.

I’m not about to write a diary-esque blog recapping everything that happened over the month I was home. Instead, here are some of the highlights of my winter break.

Oh, by the way, check out this reel I edited with some parts of my winter break (●’◡’●)

Friends

Pretty soon after I got back home, my friends and I tried arranging a meet-up day. The conversation was a little messy, but at some point, I mentioned that I had plans to pay our dance teacher a visit, to which my friends agreed. Visiting was a lot of fun; we got to sit at the front of the class and watch all the younger students work hard, and we even got to help the little kids with their stretching! We, however, did not plan out what we were going to do for the rest of the day, so when dance class ended, we stood in the hallway for 5 minutes trying to come up with what to do next, to which we decided to grab boba first. While enjoying our drinks, we settled on going over to one of our houses to play some games (especially Overcooked, because we don’t value our friendship enough to not want to play that game ❤️).

One of my favorite things I did over break was when I hung out with my best friend Tiffany. We met up at the mall to first grab boba and exchange gifts. After walking around the mall for a bit, we went for the main event of the day: ice skating. We had been talking about skating together for almost four years by that point, but it never happened because our schedules almost never aligned. I was especially excited about this since I love taking my friends skating and dragging them all across the ice. Even in the crowded public session, we still had a lot of fun; I pulled her through the people and helped her skate away from the wall, and we took lots of cute pictures together. After skating, we went to grab dinner together, and I got to introduce her to Din Tai Fung, which is one of my favorite restaurants in our area. We ended the day with me driving her home while we listened to her playlist.

In January, Ana, one of my friends here at the University of Iowa landed in Seattle. She stayed over at her friend’s place, but I got to spend some time with them while she was in town. We grabbed dinner together on the day she flew in, but it was the next time we were together that was better. I got to take the two of them ice skating at my old rink, and it was so fun seeing them dart around the rink (and also attempting some tricks, but I made sure no one got hurt). After ice skating, we went to get some boba at a store that I used to visit a lot (so much that I had a free drink I could redeem), where we ordered some drinks and a bubble waffle. We stayed there for a bit until we eventually decided to go to a shopping mall downtown, and there we walked around and shopped for a bit (the main spot was Uniqlo, which I cannot even say is a bad choice). At around 5:30pm, we went to Din Tai Fung to have dinner, where we probably ordered too much for three people who just had boba a little over an hour ago (Din Tai Fung is still great though). After we finally finished our food (I packed a bit of my red bean sticky rice to go), we walked around the mall for another hour before finally going home.

Canada

A really neat thing about being in Seattle is that it only takes a little more than 2 hours to drive to Canada. Yes, you read that right. It takes longer to drive to Oregon than it does to Canada. We also don’t really celebrate Christmas, and Christmas also means most things are closed, except for Asian places. And luckily, Vancouver has plenty of Asian places to go to. So, my family decided to spend the Christmas weekend in Vancouver.

We spent most of the trip in the Vancouver area, especially in Richmond where we knew all the good food was. The first thing we did after we crossed the border and made our way along Highway 99 and into Richmond, we went to Chef Tony Seafood Restaurant for lunch. We ordered a lot of dim sum, and everything was so good I was smiling the whole time I was eating. After lunch, we went to check into the hotel before we went to the Metropolis at Metrotown in Burnaby to walk around for a bit. We didn’t really do much apart from try on stuff at Uniqlo, look around in Daiso, and take some quick glances at T&T (we will be back later), so when we felt like we’d looked around enough, we got two cups of boba and left to go eat dinner at Neptune Palace Seafood Restaurant back in Vancouver. There we ordered a plate of lobster in soup (上湯龍蝦), steamed fish (清蒸石斑), salt and pepper steak (椒鹽肉排), and braised sprouts with crab (蟹肉扒豆苗) (I apologize if the translations are off), and we were so stuffed from lunch that we were at the restaurant for almost 2 hours. After dinner, we went back to the hotel and called it a day.

pork, lobster, and fish at Neptune Palace 🦞

On Christmas Eve, we drove up to Whistler as a day trip. It had been a few years since we last went, so it was nice to see how things changed or stayed the same. After spending about 10 minutes looking for parking, and another 5 paying for said parking, we went to eat at Joe Fortes, a restaurant that we used to eat at almost every time we drove up to Canada. The lunch menu didn’t have as many of the dishes we usually ordered, but we mostly ate at Joe Fortes for dinner anyway. The dishes we ended up ordering were all really delicious, and everything was going well until some red sauce got on my sister’s white bag and my white earmuffs. Long story short, the waitress spent almost 10 minutes trying to wipe the sauce and stain off the bag (my earmuffs were more than a decade old, so I didn’t really mind). We ended up getting a free pavlova as dessert to finish off our meal. After Joe Fortes, we walked around the village and went into a few stores (with the goal of finding a new pair of earmuffs but that wasn’t that important at that moment). When we ~~couldn’t find any earmuffs and~~ felt like we had walked enough, we went back to our car and left for the 2-hour drive back to Vancouver. Along the way back, we decided to stop by one of the waterfalls along the highway, so we went off the highway to drive to the waterfall. Unfortunately, the slope to the waterfall was snowy and icy, so my sister and I had to walk down to the viewpoint, where there was a group of people blocking the best angle for photos, and walk back up to the car. After the waterfall, we stopped by Lansdowne Centre in Richmond to eat dinner before heading back to the hotel and got ready for bed since we were leaving the next day.

On Christmas day, we had breakfast at Lido Restaurant in Richmond, where we had some great Hong Kong-style breakfast. Lido is a restaurant we eat at basically every time we’re in the Richmond area, and it felt really nice having some amazing pineapple buns and egg tarts after a while. After breakfast, we went back to Burnaby’s T&T (I told you we would be back) to do some shopping so we could bring stuff back home (and for me to get stuff I wanted to bring back to my dorm). We initially couldn’t figure out how to get into T&T, because the rest of the mall was closed for Christmas, but when we started to follow some cars that seemed to have the same goal as us, we soon realized that we had to go through a different entrance to get to the T&T-exclusive side of the mall. After almost an hour of shopping, we decided to have lunch before we drove back home, so we drove to another Neptune Palace Seafood Restaurant that was located in Brentwood. Why the encore? When we finished dinner the other day, my sister happened to spot a cute little duck-shaped mango pudding dessert at the table next to ours, and she went on for about 5 minutes about wanting to eat said pudding. We ended up ordering more dim sum—some of which were animal-shaped—and of course, the duck-shaped mango pudding. After a heavy lunch that we had to pack some to go, we finally wrapped up our trip and began the drive back home.