We had lunch today at Sabah, a local Malaysian restaurant with the people in our Guangzhou travel group. We had a great meal, but actually getting to the poing of eating the food was kind of chaotic. We were at a store across the street wasting time before meeting our guide, when all of a sudden it was 15 minutes to showtime and we were still on the top floor of the store. I sent the girls off to the hotel and I completed our purchase. We found a really cool netbook-looking translator that has dictionaries, books, games and more that is specifically designed to teach English to Chinese speakers. Kennedy test-drove it in the store and we asked her if she could learn from it and she gave us an emphatic yes. She wasn't kidding because she's spent 4-5 hours on it in the room today.
Anyway, back to the story. I'm on the top floor of the store, explaining to the very suspicious Chinese ladies behind the counter why the back of my credit card says "Ask for ID" instead of my name. Two of them fondled it for a couple of minutes before I finally realized that I could show my DL and a copy of my passport. I don't know if that made it better or worse. They examined the driver's license like they had master's degrees in anthropology. They wrote down the DL#, my passport number, and some other junk that I couldn't read and wrote all over the ticket. Seriously? Surely I was not the first white dude to go into this store and actually buy something. I explained to the salesperson that spoke pretty good English that I wrote "Ask for ID" for security. If somebody steals my card, I want them to prove that they are me before taking all my money. In the end, just like my new friends at China Southern Airlines, they wanted me to write "Ask for ID" on my signature. It's really not my name, but it would have been easier if it was.
So now, I'm hightailing it from the store to the restaurant. It's only about four blocks, but I have to walk up and over the street, because it's like the car version of that show "wipeout" to try and walk across the street. I would end up flying through the air upside down if I didn't go up and over. While I'm walking, I get a call from the guide asking for my location. I told him that I would meet the group at the restaurant. Great. It's the consulate appointment all over again. Late fail.
However, in a stroke of seemingly random awesomeness, I somehow got a head start on the group and managed to beat them to the restaurant by about 30 seconds. I'm feeling pretty good about myself at this point. Then we got in the restaurant. I've been to indoor sporting events with about 75,000 people in attendance and I've gotta say that this restaurant was louder and more crowded than any of those. I kept looking around for somebody to start the wave.
We were having two or three conversations at once which is tricky enough, but we did it with menus in hand. Everybody ordered and it was our turn and we couldn't figure it out quickly enough. First of all, half of the food on the menu was hot enough to melt solid rock. On the other hand, the rest of it was primarily designed to show off animals or body parts that are not commonly consumed in the USA. I was in for the frog curry, for example, but just like last time, nobody else would eat it. We eventually figured out what we could eat and we rolled the dice. Everything was great when the bread came out, but it was complete anarchy by the time that the noodle bowl hit the table. Except for launching the bowl to the next table, everything went as poorly as you could imagine. I started by knocking one of Annie's chopsticks onto the table. Fail. I ordered a dish with a side of pork, thinking that Kennedy would eat it with me. Nope. Fail. Annie scooped some noodles out for Mia and they were stuck together, so there was a foot and a half long rope of noodles floating over her bowl for about 45 seconds. That's an eternity, just in case you didn't know it. I got in the mix to help and only succeeded in flinging soup onto Annie's shirt. Fail. Shortly after, Mia spilled soup on her own shirt. Fail. Then the fried rice came out. It was quite good, but it had no business being all over the table or on my lap. Fail. After we had all eaten more food than necessary, the final dish that we had forgotten about, hit the table. Fatty-fatty-two-by-four Fail.
I did have the opportunity to have a traditional Chinese dessert of green bean soup. Folks, I'm not even joking about that one. You can't make this stuff up. It was literally green beans as a dessert. It was lightly sweet and just thick enough to not be gross. I don't know that I'd walk on glass to eat it again, but I'm glad that I did it. One of the people in our travel group commented that it was like oatmeal. That's not a bad comparison, actually.
The coolest thing about lunch today is that we got to meet Lily. Lily was our first contact after we learned about Kennedy. Annie got her email address from the our friends in Hawaii and started the ball rolling that turned into this awesome girl that we'll be bringing home tomorrow. We were fortunate enough to sit with her at lunch and tell her how much we appreciated her help with the paper chase.
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