Another Relaxing Day Spent Shopping and Pan-Asian Dinner with Relatives in New Jersey

Friday, September 13, 2024

Somerset New Jersey

Another Relaxing Day Spent Shopping and Pan-Asian Dinner with Relatives in New Jersey

As the days are inching closer to our departure from the US and our return to India, we are making sure we are ticking off all the items on our To-Do List. These tend to be added to—but with caution—as we are well aware that we do not have very much weight allowance left for us to add on anything too significant.

Still, after a hearty breakfast (staying with our friends, the Masuds, we are doing nothing but hearty eating as they are the most hospitable of hosts), we decided to go out shopping to finish buying the last items on our list. We headed first to Best Buy to inquire about registering for the new Iphone for Llew. And we did. But while there, I managed to twist Llew’s arm to buy himself an I-Pad (his first one ever) as the price was excellent. He did end up buying one. This meant that he had to buy a good, sturdy case for it; but since one was not available on the floor, we realized we needed to buy it online. It was a good time for me to buy a new case for mine as it was old and in very poor shape. I also needed to buy parchment paper for my baking needs. Ghazala suggested we try the Dollar Tree for the cheapest possible options. And so we headed there next. It was amazing how convenient it was to have someone who could and was free to drive us around wherever and whenever we wanted. She also knew the entire shopping landscape in her neighborhood (where to go for what and which place offered most economical prices). Indeed, Ghazala is the perfect shopping companion.

Lunch at the Masuds:

We were delayed for lunch as our shopping took longer than we expected. But Imraan held the fort at home and, on hearing by phone that we were finally headed home, he got started by frying French fries for us and we enjoyed them for lunch with Bun Kebabs—deliciously soft round buns that were filled with the most delectable beef patties and jazzed up with coriander chutney. They went so well with the fries and made the perfect meal. We enjoyed lunch fully.

and Dealing With Packing Concerns:

After lunch, Llew went online to find two I-pad cases that would work for the two of us and which would be mailed in time for our departure in a few days’ time. We were fortunate enough to find something that worked and wasted no time ordering them right away.

That done, we returned to our suitcases to take stock of our volume and weight issues and found ourselves confronted with some concerns. Still, we had a few days to do some creative packing and decided not to worry until after we had attended our friends’ daughter’s wedding.

We then took a nice long nap in the coolness of our basement apartment and awoke for a very late cuppa.

Dinner with Llew’s Relatives:

The Masuds had told us that they would be taking us out for dinner and had chosen Meemah’s, a Pan-Asian Restaurant in Edison, New Jersey, that they particularly like. However, on hearing that we were in New Jersey, Llew’s niece Katherine and her wife, Sharon, asked if they could drop by at the Masuds’ to meet us. They Masuds then very graciously extended the invitation to dinner to Katherine and Sharon, who decided to meet us at the restaurant.

We ended up arriving about twenty minutes for they did, but we went ahead and ordered in the hope that since we were ordering and going to eat family style, they would find something they would enjoy eating in the vast variety of dishes we chose. However, Katherine insisted on ordering those items that she and Sharon regularly order in Asian restaurants (in addition to the order we had already placed). The end result was that we had so much food on the table and had to pack up and take so much of it home! We started off with Hot and Sour Soup (which the Masuds recommended as they said it was really good), then moved on to Ginger Prawns, Fried Rice, Prawn Keo Tso, Fish Fillets in Garlic Sauce and then later, on Katherine’s insistence, we ordered Chicken Curry (which turned out to be the least tasty or enticing dish and something no one else wanted to eat) and Chicken Satay with Peanut Sauce (which was all that Sharon ate as she did not seem interested in anything else). The dinner was an opportunity for us to catch up with Katherine, find out how her job and other aspects of her life are going and listen to some of her recently-composed music that she also insisted we listen to in her presence, right there in the restaurant. Fortunately, by the time we were made to listen to her singing, most of the other patrons had left the restaurant and we had it pretty much to ourselves.

By the time we were ready to leave, the restaurant was ready to close! We made our way to the parking lot, where we took pictures and then said our goodbyes. When we arrived home, we tucked into the wonderful Dark Chocolate Ice-cream from Turkey Hill that Llew and I used to stock up on by the tubful and keep in our freezer downstairs.

So, it was a very late in the night when we finally said our goodnights to our hosts and went down to our basement to bed. It would be a very eventful day ahead of us as we had the big wedding of our friends’ daughter to attend and we were very much looking forward to enjoying it.

Until tomorrow…cheerio.