Adventures in Dining!

I mentioned in the Pinglin post that we had an interesting dining experience - I'm finally getting around to telling you guys about it.

Okay, so it was hot then and we'd been riding bikes in the sun all day - plus we accidentally bought this "ion water" a.k.a "sugar water" a.k.a "gross" instead of regular water so we were really looking forward to a nice lunch. We rode our bikes into town and stopped by this open air diner by the river, the food out front looked fresh and we were salivating.

So far, and luckily, we've been given menus with pictures or a well-worn English menu. This time, not so lucky. Most restaurant have these little checklists that you fill out and give to the server - which is awesome, but only if you can read the lists. Not wanting to leave only to grow more hungry and face the same problem we decided to just use the impressions that the pen made on the last order and get whatever the person(s) before us got. I handed her the list, smiling, and she looked at it, then at me, and giggled. I knew that we were in for a bit of a treat.

The menu. I just copied the indents exactly, sincerely hoping I wasn't ordering for a family of five.

First dish. I have no idea what this was, but it was good. I think it was tofu based, possibly infused with pork? Honestly, no idea.


Crispy fishies. Little 2" tiny fishes fried with green onions. Once I got over the fact I was eating whole fishes they were okay. I just kept thinking of all the omega 3 acids I was taking in. If you've ever been to BaoBei in Vancouver they have a similar item on the menu, so I had seen this particular delicacy before. I probably will never eat this ever again.

At this point, I was really hoping for a vegetable, but I think we had ordered from the appetizer/fried menu. This was a fried tofu dish, served with salty sauce. Nothing interesting to report.

When this came, I was like "more effing fried tofu?" but it was actually turnip-cake, which was surprisingly good, but sadly, still fried.

We also got this basil scrambled egg thing, and it was okay. All in all it was good - just not the refreshing meal we were looking for to fuel more bike riding.