he ma sushi

Hong Kong is a place of food. If you eat at one place, you immediately see a lot more places you want to eat at. Such happened to us, after eating at Tamae Sushi. We decided to eat at Tamae, instead of Komenya, sushi because there was not a line of about fifty people there. Mistake number one, (there will be plenty more to come), filling out the Take-out menu. The menu outside was the classic sushi check mark list, so we checked the ones we wanted. Twenty minutes after we finished, we asked a waiter to take our order. He said that we had filled out the wrong one. So we filled out the other one. Twenty minutes after filling that one out, we got the waiter to finally come into our secluded little corridor, and take our order. Mistake number two, figuring out what was what on the table. We immediately knew that the soy sauce was soy sauce. Wasabi was a little different. I took the lid of the small chopstick container like-container, put my nose as close as I could get, and inhaled very strongly, sharply, and deeply. I spent the next thirty seconds coughing up the dead. Mistake number three, reaching for the water the restaurant gave us. Most of the food places give their customers water just out of the boiling pot. So as I reached for it, I had the idea that I was doing something wrong. I spent the next thirty seconds sucking my fingers. Then the hand rolls came. These are just loads of rice with some salmon or corn or egg on top. So no problem there, you just bite it. Then the actual rolls came. There was tuna, a roll with some sort of avocado, some mayonnaise covered rolls, and a pair of massive rolls just waiting to be stuck in a mouth. So we start munching on these sushi rolls, some sashimi comes, and still the massive rolls wait patiently. Mistake number four, trying to eat one of those rolls like I would normally. With a huge blob of food in your mouth, it is quite hard to chew. It is also very difficult to keep your mouth closed. And if your tongue is persuaded to help that piece of salmon attack your gag point, it is even harder. And if you are trying to savor the blob, it is even harder. And if your mouth does not have the extensive properties of a large mouth bass, it is even harder. However, doing all the even harder things, I succeeded in, one, not throwing up, two, not letting a grain of rice escape my mouth, three, savoring the sushi, four, swallowing, and five, actually enjoying the sushi. Then, as I walked out of the place, I wondered if the Neon tetras, crabs, turtles, carp, koi, goldfish, and more at the fish market were ever to be eaten in sushi. I doubted it.

Mucky icky chinese peppers

Everybody knows that Mexicans like spicy food. Some Chinese people like spicy food too. But you could never know how different the peppers that they use are. Mexican peppers, habanero, jalapeno, and the like, are like barbarians. Chinese peppers, Hozai la and the like are like poisoners. Barbarians invite their prey; in this case your innocent taste buds, to dinner, get them drunk, then slaughter them. Poisoners, assasins, Grand Viziers, and such people, put muck in your food. The bad thing is, you don’t notice, or know that you are going to die, until after you swallow. This is what the Chinese peppers do.

shang shang shang hai sea food (UP UP upsea food)

On the first floor of the Longham place mall, there is a food court. And in that food court there are several restaurants. And in a certain restaurant called Shang Shang, they make great food. And in that great food of theirs, there are turnip pastries, spicy sour soup, fried pork ribs and cucumbers with peanut sauce. And with this food we ordered we got very, very full. The turnip pastries were extra good. The inside was soupy and the outside was very flaky. There was no trace of crisp uncooked turnip or fibrous cooked turnip, which made us wonder how the turnip came to be in there. There was no meat and even though meat makes the world go round, this was one of the best things I ate. Ever.

Are we there yet?, is that him?, AAHHG, Wheee, and Please Don’t Talk Chinglish.

A TX4 is an incredible car. It has five seats for customers, two facing the other three. There are just enough seats to fit my family. Of course, like on any two hour car ride in a taxi, the sentence “are we there yet?” happened to be said at least twice every ten minutes. Finally, when we got near our destination, the Great Wall, the supposed sightings of this long defensive investment shut the questions up. However, we never actually saw the Great Wall until we were right at it. If you want to get up to the wall from any of three ticket counters you can either cheat by taking a cable car, or you can walk up a thousand plus steps to tower eight which is closer to the alpine sledding station, destination 1, and the end of the Mutian Yu section of the great wall, destination two 2. Tower ten which is also an option and is closer to cable car station one, destination 3, and higher. We took tower ten, but the destination was debatable. I knew that I was going to destination 2, or to destination 1, just a little further than destination 2. There was however, a miscommunication.

This fail lead to my family thinking that I was going a different way, so they split up to look for me. My dad found me on my way to the highest point on the wall. After a while of walking back, we found the rest of the family and walked on our way. Unmentioned in the last part, however, was a set of very steep, slippery metal steps. Not that they were wet, they just were slippery. And so a banana peel effect happened. And as always, it happened to me.

This is where the AAHHG section of the title comes into play. I had just bought a great wall medal from an old man, and he was coming behind me. Behind him was my dad, then my mom and my siblings. Three steps down, I fell ten feet to the 1,550 year ancient Chinese stone floor. Broken bones, smashed faces, concussions, and, god forbid, death, all could have happened. None however did. The only things that happened were two scraped knees and one swollen knee with temporary extreme wobbliness. After that I climbed to the top of the MutianYu section.

There is a certain form of going down that includes a lot of fun, and certain amounts of whoops, yells and “Whee”s. This is called Alpine Sledding. I however call it Alpine AWESOME!!!!!! No joke, this thing is the BOMB!!!!!! A small black sled with certain foam parts that lift up when you push on a certain lever creates your seat. There is one lever and no steering wheel, but there are turns. It is awesome. Going down was part of the reason we came up. Lean with the turns, and you will go faster. Once the five minute ride down is up, you can go shopping in several stalls.

Some of the stallsmen/women (actually more women than men), when you try to bargain will say “low si le,” which means low to death. I only figured out that they were speaking chinglish when one particularly eccentric lady did hand motions. We bought four panda hats, two Tibetan hats, one army hat, one set of ten pins, one knife, five Tin-tin T-shirts, two daoist shirts, and a bunch of other stuff that came into our hands by money burning a hole in our pockets.

What to do when you see a fried insect on WangFuJing Food Street,

Insects are crunchy. That’s just how the things are. If insects weren’t crunchy, then they would be arachnids, or maybe some sort of sluggalia. If it is crunchy, however, you could not say that it is an insect. If it is on a stick, and/or bought on a street stall, then it probably is an insect. You can also associate crunchy things with insects. Like bee cocoons. Crunchy, as bee cocoons should be. Of course, you can have your choice of spices, although some culinary artists say that is cheating, to make your insect/bee cocoon/other crunchy item yours. Such spices include: poisoning peppers (see next entry), salt, cardamom, and other USFE (Unidentified Stuff For Eating) that create your insect/bee cocoon/other crunchy item into a tasty crunchy item on a stick. And if you see bee cocoons on a first stall, wait until you get to a couple stalls over, because the first is the most expensive.

Maoism

In a nation where one man set in motion a rage that killed tens of thousands of people, you would think that man would be hated. Instead this uncle was revered like a god. Killing sparrows, criticizing teachers to the point of death, and sending people to starve and re educate in the country side are these cat’s most famous deeds. He meows his name a lot but leaves out the ‘w’ and changes the ‘e’ to an ‘a’. He has approximately 1.3 billion minions who like to say his name the same way, “Mao.”

Among these minions are 100,000 people who stay in a “line” for two hours just to see his body. This line, however, is more a surging mass of pushing people, knife-elbowed grandmas, and almost-squashed five-year-old children. And on Saturday the 17, 2009 at approximately 10:00 in the morning, five foreigners joined the fray to see contestant in Baddest Person Ever (along with Stalin and Adolf), responsible for the deaths of seventy million people, former president of the People’s Republic of China, Chairman Mao Zedong.

In an enormous mausoleum, covered by a glass wall and a glass case, His body lies. His body is very orange, and it has an unnatural glow to it. But that is not the scariest thing. The line is horrible. At any break possible, everybody runs to get ahead of everybody resulting in no one getting ahead of anybody. Grandmas are especially good at pushing you aside because of their short height, and because of their extremely sharp elbows that just happen to come flying into your ribs. Several men try to push past and you have to be firm—very, very firm. So when you go to China, pop over to Beijing, get the Mao’s Mausoleum Line experience, see a very orange body. Have some fun.