People eat those fresh?!?

Tina shared a new breakfast treat with me!

A fried dumpling with juicy pork and onions inside. Apparently, the
car share that she takes into work started taking a new route and
 stopping at a shop that sells these. The driver kept buying them then Tina
decided to give one a shot. It was delicious but definitely not healthy.

This was the exciting part of the day:

Do you know what these are?

 They're fresh olives! I didn't know that people ate them fresh. Sounds like it is not common here but one of the guys from the QA dept brought these back from his home town. Ewgenia really likes them so she was given a few and decided to share with the rest of the department. I also found out that no one had ever had a brined olive so I'm going to bring some in to work tomorrow for them to try. It just so happens that I have both green and black olives in my refrigerator :)

It's an acquired taste. They are also rock hard which means that you really have

 to gnaw on them for awhile. The picture on the right is my olive after about 15 mins 

of working on it. It's bitter and sour at first then it becomes very fragrant in your mouth.

Later in the day...

   On the way home from work I was trying to figure out what to make for dinner. During the walk to the subway I passed a street vendor selling roasted sweet potatoes that smelled so good...so I decided that if the vendor that is normally at my subway stop is there tonight that I would buy the biggest sweet potato that she had and make mashed sweet potatoes. You see, it is daily torture getting off and walking through my subway stop b/c there are always several food vendors that cook right at the opening of the subway entrance so all the amazing smells drift down to you before you even exit the station. I normally just walk right past them and their smells b/c I'm so close to home and know that I have good food waiting for me but, man, it can be tempting. Today the sweet potato women was there...

Here's her cart. Her roaster is that big metal contraption.
Yes, it's on a bike! :) 

My sweet potato was bigger then a softball.
 It was roasted to perfection.

And of course, my desert. This one was not sweet bean paste, still really good though.