The Portfolios

We had a great time on Xianyi’s birthday, April 16th (this post is a few days late as I was late getting the photos off the camera). For weeks, she told me she didn’t want to have any celebration, and that she didn’t even want presents, because she loves saving money so much. Yeah, right. Well, just one present, she said. Two pairs of shoes from the Gap, which I ordered for her online. As luck would have it, Gap doesn’t deliver to China (thanks a lot, Gap). So I sent them to my Mom’s house and told Piers to help me out. That was 2 months ago. Haven’t seen any shoes yet.

In the meantime, I made sure to get a few presents for Xianyi so she wouldn’t have a presentless birthday morning. I personally designed some notepads and had them printed through this company on the net, which sent them to us in the mail - cool! And I know she loves Ella Fitzgerald, so I downloaded some albums, burned them onto discs and printed out the album covers proper-like.

No parties, she kept telling me. But on the day itself, I got a text message that had clearly been sent to not only me: “Please join me for my birthday drinks tonight at Mesa, no problem if you can’t make it.” Very cool. So we ended up meeting there with Emma - who was the only one who could make it! Well, I said, short notice, people work, etc. But there was also a big event planned for the evening…

The Roots were in town. I had known about it for weeks but because of the timing, I never tried to get tickets. Not her kind of thing, I figured. I think I even asked her about it, like, would you want to go to a hip-hop concert on your birthday? “No.” Of course not. But fate thought otherwise.

Brad and Helen had tickets - but they were in Henan getting married, and Helen’s parents were making them stay longer than they planned. Suddenly they had two tickets they couldn’t use, and so they called Xianyi and said, it’s your birthday, take them!

Wow! At first she demurred, but Brad was insistent (yeah, Brad!) and Xianyi eventually relented. So we ended up at the show, which was fantastic, and she had the best time! Even though she had a hurt foot (left over from when Dahai and Shenjun were in town a couple weeks ago) she was dancing around and having a blast, and so were all of us. Hip-hop birthday with the Roots!

Go here to see all the pictures from the Roots concert.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 21st, 2007 at 4:04 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.