明天课时

I have a test tomorrow, so I won't be catching up on the blog. But I couldn't let the evening go by without telling everyone about another accidental dinner. This time in the opulent direction. The guidebook said it was a good Hong Kong style dim sum restaurant. My friend was in shorts and a T-shirt, so we were a little intimidated pulling our bikes into the skyscraper parking lot and walking past the line of staff from the two competing restaurants in the building. One set had sassy cowboy hats on, but that wasn't our restaurant.

It turns out our attire wasn't a problem, because we got a private booth. I opened the menu to see a page where the lowest cost dish was 400rmb, and went up to 5000. --oops. A little out of our range for the day. A little page turning (my menu was 30+ pages long) and a little comparison of the cash in our pockets let us know it was ok. The prices dropped tremendously the deeper we got. And it took us a while to figure out that we each had completely different menus, so the sum total was about 60 pages, divided regionally.

So we set a budget of 100rmb each, and ordered from our own menus. I had small plates. Seth had main dishes. We wound up with:

• A plate of seaweed salad. Less flavorful than Japanese, but very tasty.
• Thin slices of dried seasoned beef. Very salty and tender.
• Scallops and scallions served cold. there were a couple extra parts of the scallop that I recognized from our West Seattle adventure a while back. This was the top dish in my opinion.
• Fried shrimp sticks. No other way to put it. Shrimp chopped into a seasoned paste, battered and fried. Served with a little mayo.
• A clay pot of vegetable soup with noodles. I have no idea what some of the stuff was. I latched onto some sort of fungus that I didn't care for, but overall it was delicious.
• A noodle dish served with cabbage and a vinegrette.

And for all the crappy service I've received in the past couple weeks, this evening's experience made up for it. The fuyuan looked a little upset when we attempted to serve the noodles to ourselves. I think the intention was for her to let us look at it for a few minutes, then she was supposed to remove it to a side table for dressing. There was no reason to call "fuyuan, maidan" (I'm not sure if I've said it yet, but frequently, and especially at the sorts of places we've been at, this is yelled at the top of your lungs--I - am - not - kidding.) at the end of the meal, because the fuyuan was never more than a whisper away.

A plate of melon (some sort of honeydew), watermelon and lychees was served for dessert. And I even resisted spitting the seed onto the table.

We got someone else's bill, so we still had a little sticker shock. Profuse apologies were offered when we started opening our dictionaries trying to figure out what cost 195rmb on our table.

And in the end, the 500rmb dishes were for table-style dishes. We might not be able to read fast, but eventually we figure stuff out. I just wish I had a picture of the expression on my face when I first saw the menu.

Total bill in US dollars: $25.