I turned 21 yesterday! I just wanted to pop by and document the day real quick. No pretty or artsy photos. Just iPhone photos in janky lighting. But good good memories. I also vlogged the day as I’ve been challenging myself to vlog this whole week, and it’s been going strong since Monday. Hopefully I’ll make it until the end of the week so that you can you can look out for daily vlogs on my channel throughout next week!
I slept in because I had stayed up until 4AM binge watching Famous In Love (it’s addicting omg). When I woke up, Marjorie’s mom was setting a bowl of noodles and a plate of veggies and eggs on my coffee table (Marjorie is my roomie, and her family has been staying with us for the past week). Marjorie’s mom told me that she had made me longevity noodles and wished me a happy birthday! It’s tradition in Chinese culture to have longevity noodles on your birthday, though I’m pretty sure this was the first time I had longevity noodles on my birthday. But even though it was a first, eating that bowl of longevity noodles felt so homely. When I got up later in the day, Marjorie’s family had left for New York, and I found the birthday post-it that Marjorie had left for me!
Bomi was coming over to the apartment to celebrate with me in the evening, so I planned to have a productive afternoon at Green Engine Coffee doing homework before then. I mostly wrote emails, finalised my course schedule for the fall semester, and worked in my sketchbook. In my sketchbook, I needed to take notes on readings, and make ten rough sketches and three 7″x7″ refined sketches. It felt really peaceful working on my sketchbook in a coffee shop in the afternoon by myself. Approaching dinner time, I was starting to feel peckish, so I headed back to my apartment even though I didn’t get through all my sketches quite yet.
inspired by this meme
When Bomi and I were planning how to celebrate my 21st, she suggested getting free birthday rainbow shots from a local pub. However, there was only the two of us and neither of us drink much, so we thought it’d probably be safer not to. I had been wanting to try Wit & Delight’s rosé sangria recipe, so I suggested trying that instead to fulfill my boozy 21st experience.
Our first order of business was to pop by the local wine and spirits shop to look for the alcohol the recipe called for: rosé, Grand Marnier, and brandy. As I mentioned earlier, neither of us drink much, so neither of us know much about alcohol. It took us a long while to find the type of alcohol the recipe called for (we were wandering the aisles like lost puppies) and then another while to choose between brands and flavours. We ended up choosing the cheapest ones we could find. We upgraded the recipe’s rosé to a rosé spritzer (Barefoot) and got a peach brandy (E&J). We opted out of the Grand Marnier because we didn’t really want to buy three bottles for the two of us, and because according to Google, Grand Marnier is just cognac and cognac is just brandy and we already had brandy. I bought both bottles, got carded, and it was wonderful.
Second order of business was to pop by the supermarket to buy the rest of the ingredients for the rosé sangria: raspberries, strawberries, nectarines, limes (also honey, but I already had honey so we didn’t need to buy any).
Third order of business was to pick up Indian food.
By the time we made it back to the apartment, we were starving, so we quickly put all the fruits and alcohol into the fridge before digging into our food whilst watching Criminal Minds. Some of my favourite moments in college have been just sitting on the ground with friends, chatting, and eating Indian food.
After an episode, we were ready to give the rosé sangria a go. I recorded the whole process, which was 30 minutes of footage (don’t worry, I’m definitely cutting it down for the vlog). We had a lot of fun haha. Before we mixed the alcohol, we wanted to try each of them by themselves. The brandy was so strong omg! The peach smelled good but it kinda hurt to drink even though I only had like, half a sip. I’ll probably give the bottle away. The rosé spritzer was pretty good though!
After making the rosé sangria, we had a mini photo session, which just so happened to give the fruits plenty of time to infuse. We watched one more episode of Criminal Minds whilst sipping on our rosé sangria. It was delicious actually, which makes it the first alcohol beverage that I’ve ever liked (or second if you count the rosé spritzer by itself)! Though I turned quite warm and red. But also I was wearing a warm sweater, so who knows who to blame??
Bomi dozed off part way through the episode, so when it finished, I put her to bed and then spent the rest of the evening (more like morning) finishing off my sketchbook work.