Expat Squared

This post has nothing to do with either my recent honeymoon or my adventures in Nairobi.  It’s just a bit of regular life in London, where I’m hanging out with friends before going to California for a family function.

But first, a little background.

Kayla, a friend of mine from university and also the friend whose house I’m crashing at currently (the house with the ominous whip), went to graduate school with a particularly high-on-herself woman who, it turned out, was half-Mexican.  The high-on-herself and her half-Mexicanness were unrelated — I just felt the need to point out that she was obnoxious.

Um, sure, what’s my point, right?

Well, she wasn’t actually half-Mexican, despite her myriad smug assertions that she was.  (And despite the fact that, I believe, she received financial aid because of her minority status.)

It turns out that her stepmother was Mexican.  So this woman determined through some completely opaque logic that she was, therefore, half-Mexican.

Well, yesterday, Tammy, Kayla and I went to lunch at a Chinese restaurant near their office to partake of the culinary wonder that is crispy duck.  The three of us were hungry, so we ordered a half duck to share.

What showed up was the most anemic-looking and pathetic half-duck ever.  But not a one of us commented.  We just ate what little of it there was and ended up still hungry after we had finished lunch, which is, according to dietitians, a good thing.  What we ate was tasty, but it was not half a duck.

The only logical conclusion was that whatever the wee little bird was, it’s stepmother must have been a duck.

Then the bill showed up.  They had served us a lousy little quarter duck.  So I guess that means it’s stepmother’s mother was duck.