27

Yesterday, February 13th was my 27th birthday! Almost a Valentine baby. 

It was a wonderful day. I got to sleep in and relax in the morning. Colin suprised me with pink roses. Then, we left for Madison, which is about a 2 hour drive from where we live. Why Madison? Because I told Colin the one thing I wanted to do for my birthday (besides adopt immediately!) was go to an Ethiopian restaurant again. The closest we found was Madison.

We'll get to that in a bit. :)

Colin also wanted to take me to a zoo. I LOVE animals. Let me remind you that we live in Wisconsin. And it's winter. Snow. And cold.

Needless to say, we pretty much had the zoo to ourselves! It was quite awesome. A winter wonderland zoo in private. All for free!

We first went into the primate building. I think we spent at least 30 minutes watching two orangutans. They were just hilarious, showing off, hanging from ropes and even the ceiling grate.

Giraffe. Love their long-necked beauty!

Us!

We were then supposed to go eat at an Ethiopian restaurant we found online.

Guess what? It was no longer there!

Colin was told by a stranger to take me to a Brazilian grill called Samba!

We had never had Brazilian food before and were in for quite a treat! I am a foodie and love to try new cuisines. 

To start, there was a beautiful buffet of salads, vegetables, olives, garlic spread, etc. My favorite side was sweet potato salad with chipotle-orange dressing. I need to recreate this. :)

Also, we had a wooden pillar on our table with green on one side and red on the other. When we flipped it to green, a 'gaucho' would come to our table with one of many varieties of grilled meats on a huge skewer and cut off a piece for each of us right onto our plate.

All the meats were so wonderful--our favorite was the flank steak in a churrasco balsamic marinade. We tried lamb for the first time. It was okay! We loved the grilled pineapple dusted with cinnamon and sugar.

It was nice to experience this unexpected cuisine with Colin. We both agreed that it brought us back to our honeymoon in Cancun! There was just something about the ambience and the smells.

Afterwards, we went to Trader Joe's, as this is also the closest one to us! We stocked up on a whole bunch of goodies. We were checking out and talking to the cashier and mentioned to him that it was my birthday. Well, the store manager overheard our conversation and gifted me with some flowers!

I thought that it was just so nice of him to do that.

We drove home through more snow and ate some chocolate cake that Colin made me! 

I felt spoiled. Colin always takes such great care of me.

So, even though the 'one thing I wanted to do' didn't happen, we improvised with lovely results!