Awesome weekend!

Wow! Fantastic weekend! And it's still only Saturday night! Matt and I just got home from an overnight stay in Edmonton. We went to visit Matt's sister and her husband and got to stay at their gorgeous home while we there! This morning they took us around town to show us how to live in Edmonton. We started with the Edmonton Indoor Farmer's Market. It was great! I love Farmer's Markets and this one was awesome. Matt and I ended up getting some sourdough bagels, beets, tea and a gigantic bag of kettle corn. Seriously, it was huge. Then they took us to a dutch store called Ben's Meats. They had a load of stuff that is really hard to find! And, it was all really well priced. Usually specialty shops are more expensive than chain stores but that was not the case with this one. Matt and I loaded up on dutch candy and some smoked pigs ears for Cash. We then went for lunch at West Ed and after we ate we took Gabe down to see the Flamingos... only they aren't there anymore! Now there are lemurs! They were cute and Gabe loved watching them. We were headed home and decided we needed one more thing - bubble tea! So they took us to a place called Dream Tea House which was awesome. After stopping off at home again for a bit we headed out for dinner and went to a place called the New Asian Village for some Indian food. I was a little bit worried about whether or not I would like it since I'm not a huge curry fan, but I was excited for the experience. I'd never eaten in an Indian restaurant before. Well we weren't able to get one of their cool rooms without a reservation but they were able to seat us right away. They have a $20 buffet that almost all of us decided to go for except Matt who decided to get Goat Balti (yep, goat). I tried about half of everything in the buffet, which still was a load and piled my plate up for sure. I had the saffron rice, some curry lamb, butter chicken, naan bread, chili chicken, tandoori chicken and a bunch of other things I can't remember. It was all good. I won't say it was all really good because there's just some things I don't like - like cilantro. But if you enjoy the flavours, the food was fantastic. Our waiter was awesome too. He saw that all of us had gone with the buffet except Matt and came back to tell us that the dish Matt ordered actually takes 30 minutes to cook so he told Matt that he could help himself to the buffet and that he'd pretend it wasn't happening :) And then, 10 minutes later he brought Matt's food and told us that he'd asked the chef to cook it in the tandoori (aka stupidly hot) oven so that it would cook much faster. I then had some of their masala tea, rice pudding and mango custard. The mango custard was better than I thought it would be since I don't really like mango, but the rice pudding was awesome. It was super creamy and was done with a short grain rice so that it looked like cottage cheese but it was cold so that kinda threw me off. It had more flavor than conventional rice pudding though. It had pistachios and almonds in it and had a distinct chai flavour to it. I really liked it. Well, we came home with only one mishap on the way (we stopped at a gas station and as I opened up the door to get out, Cash jumped out of the back seat and ran into the parking lot. Typically we don't have much luck getting him to come back near the car and after some running towards moving vehicles he got so scared of all the noises and cars that he came back to Matt even though he knew he'd have to go back in the car) and unfortunately found that our gerbil had died. But it's not really sad since it was almost 5 years old. Seriously. They usually live 3 years.
Well, it was an awesome weekend and we still have tomorrow to go! I'm going to go eat bagels and drink tea now!

Mrs. Vander Leek ;)