Candy Sushi in a Library?

To celebrate Asian Heritage Month, a Public Library in Canada hosted a special Teen Zone, where teens learned how to make origami and candy sushi. Doesn't that sound like fun?

“We have our program so the kids can have fun, but if possible we also like them to learn,” said Randolph White, one of the leaders of the Teen Zone.

For the candy sushi, they constructed a version of the nori wrap. Seaweed was replaced with fruit roll ups; instead of rice they used rice crispy squares; Swedish fish were used instead of real fish; sour candy strips in place rather than actual wasabi sauce; and nibs as avocados.

Sugar Overload!

There was a variety of origami designs they could make, including a giraffe, a frog and a bird, which the teens learned to make from books borrowed from the library.

This Teen Zone network in Canada does a learning activity for every major heritage month. It's good to see them teaching the young ones about Japanese cuisine and culture.

“We like to do activities about the culture so there aren’t stereotypes,” said White. In the past the teens have learned about Mexican heritage by playing with a piñata and a Mexican trivia game. Also, coming up the teens of Teen Zone will be learning about Jamaican Heritage.

Why don't we have something like this in Orlando?

Free Dessert With Dinner - Tonight Only

We're currently running Facebook and Twitter campaigns that offer a free dessert if you come in for dinner. This offer is only good for tonight, so you better start asking your friends to stop by with you.

We're posting about this because our plans are to do more things like this every week.

You'll have to fan us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter to reap the benefits of these offers.

We hope to see some of you tonight for dinner!

My Cambodia OneNote TripBook

This is a Sponsored post written by me on behalf of Microsoft for SocialSpark. All opinions are 100% mine.

Next summer, I plan on visiting Cambodia with my wife and her best friend, who happens to be Cambodian. We have always talked about going throughout our college lives together, but now that we are grown adults and can afford to do so, we plan to make it a reality immediately. 

Since I enjoy being a planner, I decided to go ahead and start laying out the details of our trip. I wanted to be able to pinpoint the most important cites and establish an itinerary that will be enjoyable and action-packed. 

Microsoft's new Office application, OneNote, ended up being the perfect program to allow me to do what I want. 

Here's a screenshot of my Cambodia OneNote TripBook.

Since so much research had to be conducted on the web, some of OneNote's functions really saved me time. The Screen Clipping action, for example, allowed me to grab a screenshot and insert it into my OneNote immediately. It was so easy and saved me the time I would have spent screen capturing it and inserting it into the program manually. 

Since there are 3 of us going on the trip, the Co-Authoring feature was ideal for our planning. With a touch of a button, I could share the OneNote with the other two parties and even tag items that would link out to the web for even more nuggets of information. 

For ultimate note-taking, OneNote allows you to scribble anywhere within the program. Since I really wanted the other two individuals to choose the hotel we were staying at first and foremost, I went ahead and circled my choice hotel before I shared it with them. I told them to do the same thing, but in a different color. Aside from actually talking about it over the phone, this could be the best way to come to a group decision while in remote locations.

Thanks to Microsoft's OneNote program, we are now ready for a trip to Cambodia that I won't need to pack for for another 11 months. It feels good to be so ahead of the game. Yet, I have a feeling we'll have to keep passing the TripBook back and forth as our research leads us to new ideas for our trip. 

To see my complete TripBook in full action, please visit onenotetravel.com.