Birthday Boy!

So yesterday was Arjan's 23rd birthday! He's practically an old man now.
This is the first time we've celebrated it out of Brighton, but we didn't want that to stop us from keeping to our tradition of a lazy morning, a nice dinner out and a few drinks. So that's exactly what we did!
I'm not going to lie, most of our mornings are pretty darn lazy these days, but what made this one special was that, when she came back from the hairdresser, Arjan's mum brought us sandwiches from Bufkes!
For those of you who are non-Limburgers (I'm guessing a majority) I can only describe Bufkes as the Subway of the Southern Netherlands. They do freshly made sandwiches on little, crispy petit pain with a variety of hot and cold fillings, and they are good! Our favourite is a custom job, the Broodje Limburger, a hot sandwich with a sliced hammy, porky meatball, coleslaw, mustard sauce and lettuce, only we add cheese. The super fake, square-sliced, american burger cheese, and they put it under a grill for a minute so it melts unctuously over the meatball. It's heavenly.
These sandwiches tasted especially good as they were the first thing we ate having completed two fast-days in a row!

this boy has the bite radius of a great white shark (in Pink Floyd jammy bottoms)

Now if that's not a look of ecstasy I don't know what is. 

So after we pigged out on sandwiches we decided to head over to Oma's for a birthday visit. We brought her a piece of obligatory birthday vlaai (a kind of cakey flan base with a selection of toppings such as fruits, custards and creams) and had a glass of port or two. 

Then came the sushi. 

Yumi was a place we first discovered on NYE and have not been able to stop thinking about since. It calls itself 'all-you-can-eat' which I suppose it is, though not in the traditional buffet style. You pay €22.95 a head and then you can order 5 rounds, with 5 items per round per person. This sounds like it could potentially not be that much, but believe me, we have not made it past round 4. 

There is a huge selection of sushi, salad, soup, grilled and fried items to choose from and we kept saying to ourselves "we should try something different this round" then going for a bunch of stuff we already had cause it was just that good. 

This was part of round 1, the smear of sauce happened when one piece hit the deck on its way over

This was called The Bomb and oh boy, was it! Not sure what's inside but that's avocado sauce, tobiko and mayo on top.

Nigiri: Octopus, prawn and seared tuna.

We were so busy stuffing our faces and getting excited about what to order next that I forgot to take pictures about 80% of the time. 

We toasted "Kanpai" with some hot sake 

Avocado, sweet-water shrimp and seared tuna (again) 

One of the most impressive looking was the tempura prawn roll, in the back is a corn and crab gunkan

Rather than soldiering through the 5th round as we had earlier resolved to do, we gracefully called it quits and accepted we could eat no more, so we finished with refreshing green tea and coconut ice cream and braved the cold to head for the train station. 

Before going home we stopped in at one of the local pubs for a drink, Arjan loves him some draft beer!

One thing I like about Holland is the wide selection of 'girly' beers, this was cherry flavoured! 

When we got back home we headed to bed to watch a scary film and finished of a bottle of Disaronno in some cocktails.

So although my presents for him have still not arrived Arjan said that he thoroughly enjoyed his birthday, so I feel a little less guilty about it. 

Another thing we feel less guilty about is eating all that food! We walked a healthy 3.7 miles after dinner and burned off at least a little of it.

Tonight is birthday celebration part 2, as it's our drummer's birthday today and Arjan is hosting a night at the pub we went to for the release of the final EP of his old band, we'll be playing DJ and I'll be the photographer for the evening so expect some pictures of that tomorrow!