Cultural Education (or "I'd have rather had a moon PIE")

We are now five days and a few hours away from our scheduled flight time!  (Keep checking the Countdown Timer tab!) The excitement (a.k.a. "Stress") keeps building by the minute. We've double-checked our paperwork for our trip and we've started packing suitcases. We've set aside our original orphanage donations for a local christian charity that helps homeless and needy families in our area.

An interesting story of cultural education:

With the Lunar or "Chinese" New Year, we decided to do a little celebrating with BSP's godparents & their children. We went to an authentic Chinese restaurant in east Fairfax that has long been a favorite of ours. As always, the dinner was phenomenal and the service was wonderful. Once we were done with dinner and had paid the check, the waitress brought out an unexpected and unidentified gift for us. The gift was an odd, heavy, round, brown, pie-like object with five red fruit or beans on top and a leaf wrapper underneath. It was roughly eight inches in diameter and more than an inch thick.

One half of the object

After asking our waitress, she informed us that it was a "moon cake" and we thanked her for the gift. We'd never had a moon cake before, so we thanked the waitress and took our gift home without trying it (we'd eaten too much dinner by then).  We split the cake in half (a very difficult cut) and gave one half to our friends.  The following evening after dinner, I decided that I was in the mood for something sweet and that I would try a piece of the moon cake.  I sliced off a small wedge and eagerly took a healthy bite.  To my great dismay, the moon cake, not only had bizarre visual and tactile characteristics, it also had the consistency of wax and the taste of vinyl.  This was quite possibly the single blandest thing I had ever eaten.  I am certain that I could make a mixture of bleached flour and distilled water that would yield more flavor than this moon cake.  After disposing of our half of the offending object, we warned our friends about the moon cake.  We were too late.  They had also tried it and found it to be lacking in every aesthetic measure.  I have since determined the following possible explanations for this object's existence:

1. The Chinese are really bad at desserts, and this was really bad by Chinese standards.
2. This was a decoration, made in fact from synthetic materials and was not meant for consumption.
3. This was the Chinese equivalent of the immortal fruitcake and was meant to be eternally re-gifted.
4. This was a practical joke that went too far - and the wait staff are still laughing at us.

In other news, we have selected our Secret Mystery Guest Blogger (SMGB) and they are now officially on staff.  To those of you who submitted applications, essays, and videos, but were not selected, we deeply thank all 1700+ of you for your interest in the position.  Despite the many qualified and talented applicants, there can be only one.