Chinese food here, Chinese food there

by Tilly

Asia City. Not so much a city as a big, messy, confusing shopping centre. Nevertheless, there we were on a Monday morning (we had the morning off, so no need to tell our boss on us). There’s a shop that sells stickers for a ridiculously low, low price, which makes Tara-Zee very happy (I don’t know, she sticks them in her diary or something), and that makes me happy. Until lunchtime anyway.

“What should we eat, TZ?” I asked her innocently. “Um, I don’t know. Maybe we can find a Chinese restaurant.” She can be so sarcastic sometimes.

Sitting on chairs covered with plastic, we ordered Coke Light and a Sweet and Sour each (pork for TZ, prawn for me). ‘You didn’t share!?’ you might ask with surprise, but we did share spring rolls. They were hot. Temperature hot. Not spicy hot, or hot like Paris Hilton says it. They were very nice.

But, the Sweet and Sour… Why is something so bad for you so good? TZ and I will have to ponder it over a bottle (I mean, a glass) of wine sometime. It was fried, it was sweet, it was sour. It was heavenly. I asked TZ if Asian food in South Africa tasted the same in Asia (her and Mr. TZ have recently been) and she said, yes. This made me feel happy. It’s comforting. Sort of like if you go to a strange country and you don’t know the food, so you order MacDonald’s knowing what to expect. It makes me feel that the world is not so big to know that I can order Sweet and Sour something anywhere and I can sort of know what it should taste like. (I might not order the prawn just anywhere though…)

Anyway, keeping with the ‘fried food is good’ theme, we bought a huge (and ridiculously cheap) bag of prawn chips. Nothing like a bag of fried crisps in a variety of colours. This prompted us to wonder how they make those. As you can tell, it was a day of many questions. Turns out, it’s not as bad as you would imagine. It’s actually just bits of prawn, tumeric, salt and oil. And we decided that since the bag came with no nutritional information on it, that they were in fact calorie-free. Bonus.

Lunch ended with a fortune cookie. My fortune told me that “Anything is possible with a willing heart.” But nothing about heart burn, which was a great pity.

PS. My lottery numbers are: 5-9-12-22-39-24. Use it/don’t use it.
PPS. If you use it and you win, you owe me dinner.