Thai Food and Mental Floss

Mostly, today consisted of me telling myself how much I needed to get done, and then failing to actually do it. But I'll spare you the details.

Tonight, Rachel, Chialing, Ariel (an ETA from last year who spent this year studying in Taipei) and I went to an absolutely adorable Thai restaurant down by the Banana Pier, where we gorged ourselves on green curry (my favorite), some sort of pork mash (Chialing's favorite, which we teased her for), coconut milk-seafood soup (Ariel's favorite, maybe?), pickled cucumbers (Rachel's perennial favorite), stewed cabbage, and empty heart vegetable (EVERYONE's favorite). Afterwards, we all agreed we were stuffed.

So, naturally, we all then set out to get ice cream. Not right away, of course; we made a little detour to the Love River to walk, sit, chat, and let our food digest. BUT THEN! Ice cream. And waffles. Obviously.

Question for my American readers: do we have ice cream with waffles in the States? I can't remember ordering it, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's not a thing there. Is it? It DEFINITELY is here, as is ice cream inside "toast," aka a loaf of hollowed-out bread.

Anyway, at a great little place just a block off one of my main routes but which I'd never seen before (also discovered on the back roads: another Smokey Joe's!), we got two waffle/ice cream combos, one chocolate banana and the other blueberry, and enjoyed them while smacking at mosquitoes and getting excited about how cold our metal chairs were (summer is here, for sure).

In all, a great night.

But where does the "mental floss" of the title come in, you wonder? Well. That would be via Sporcle.com, my latest easy-to-justify waste of time. Their website includes lots of things that I haven't yet explored; what I have explored, repeatedly, is their geography quizzes. Surprise surprise: I, like most Americans, have unfortunately never had a proper geography education, and therefore when I began quizzing myself I sucked.

However, as of about a half hour ago, I had a breakthrough: all 48 countries in Asia named in less than a minute. (Now, if only I could get the East coast of Africa straight in my mind...) So now I'm challenging you: how are you at geography? Click here and let me know how you do.

Beware of the Middle East, tiny countries and the hard-to-spell "stans"...