Animal Zoo vs. Asian Zoo

I went home to entertain my mom this weekend.

"Alexa, do you want to play a game with me?"
"What's that?"
"Well, when you leave home, you call me and say, 'falafel.' Then, when you get to your destination, you call me and say, 'hummus.'"
"Haha, okay...why are we speaking in code?"
"For FUN!!!"

The highlights of hummusing this weekend were visiting the zoo, home of new baby giraffes, and Hmart, mecca to all Asian grocery lovers.

The zoo was fun. We like animals. The Houston zoo has new baby giraffes!
Okapis are related to giraffes. They are silly-looking creatures. This one was particularly showy, as it wanted to walk right up to the fence and poop for us.

"Alexa! Take a picture! No, closer! He's not done! He's going to poop! Hurry, this is so nan-de (rare opportunity)!"

Okapis have tongues so long that they can lick their own eyeballs. That's not all they can lick.

Afterwards, we went to Hmart, where we just happened upon Asian Food Festival Weekend. This phrase actually means "sample stands every 2 feet all across the giant grocery store." The place was so packed that it was impossible to move at a pace any faster than a saunter, and every two seconds we lost our shopping cart because we had abandoned it to chase down the next sample stand.

"Alexa! Let's eat! Here. Here is your lunch."
She hands me rice wrapped in seaweed on a toothpick.
"Thanks."

We took the food festival very seriously, as we did not fail to miss even one sample stand in the store. At the end, when I was tired from sampling:
rice drink
grape juice
aloe vera drink
many varieties of vinegar drink
ramen
okonomiyaki
rice with furikake
tuna sashimi
many varieties of kim chi
kim chi pizza
rice cakes
fish cakes
salmon with miso
cold soba noodles
mochi ice cream
dried crab and squid
seaweeds
tofu with sesame dressing
yogurt drink
asian meatballs
potstickers

...she pulled me into an aisle to "show me something." "Something" turned out to be the sample stands of chestnut-filled pancakes and yakisoba. We sampled those too.

What was truly amazing was that even though the place was so packed with people, checking out was surprisingly breezy because all of the people were not actually buying things; they were sample-hopping for as long as we had been. When we finally left, I looked at my watch and realized that we had spent as long at Hmart as we had at the zoo.

"Alexa, Hmart won. We bought a lot of stuff. Ha! Ha!"

So, the weekend was a success.
We even developed a new language:
"Okay, so we have code words 'falafel' and 'hummus.' What else do we need?"
"Do we need other code words?"
"What about for when we need to pee? Wasabi?!"
"Haha, that's good. It even sounds like 'pee.'"
"Yes, yes what else. What about when we're looking for a place to eat?"
"Can we just say, 'I'm hungry?'"
"Yeah I guess. Oh if we need water, we say 'sushi!'"
"Okay, sushi."
"Alexa, your to-fa (hair) smells. What's the code for that?"
"Well obviously that's 'tofu.'"
"Why are all these words food?"