Who's ready for safe fun?!

I came down with a bit of a fever this weekend. Yellow fever! Yes, I spent the entire holiday weekend with some of my new Asian friends. The fun began on Saturday, when I went to a rooftop shrimp fest in downtown Seattle. The weather was perfect, the booze flowed freely, and I got to sample some new cuisine. You see, part of the shrimp fest was to eat Live Shrimp. It's like sushi... but way more hardcore.

You start with regular shrimp. They're alive and overjoyed at getting to travel new places, like the Seattle fish market! Then they're unceremoniously dumped into a bowl of icy seawater, which paralyzes them. Finally the shrimp come face to face with a ravenous Asian (or drunken white boy), and they are devoured. You break off their head and peel off the shell, dip them quickly in a citrus, soy sauce, and wasabi mixture, and down the hatch it goes! Seriously. This is what I did. It's kind of badass.

Of course, I had to prep myself with a little tequila. Then a lot of tequila. The night ended with me passed out face down in a kitchen downtown, with a bathrobe draped over my body.

Then I rallied for the Fourth of July, which took place at an Asian party by a local lake. Let me just say that Asian people have TOTALLY different concepts of personal safety when it comes to children playing with fireworks! Firstly, Washington State has sick fireworks because all the Indian reservations sell the super illegal stuff. So all the Asian parents were handing kids these insane bottle rockets and what looked (and sounded) like tiny grenades, which they would jam into bottles, tiki torches, aluminum cans, or whatever they could find, light it off and just pray it didn't veer back towards the lakehouse or spray shrapnel.

And as my final example of the stringent safety requirements, I seriously witnessed this conversation:

Kid: Mine didn't go off!
Adult: That a dud. It no good.
(Kid starts to toss the dud in a garbage can near the food)
Adult: What you doing?! That not safe!
Kid: Where do I put it?
Adult: Toss it in campfire.