Thursday 23rd February, 2017                       1945

Well yesterday I was forced to go shopping as the wine lake had evaporated and in line with the current trend, I ate out before shopping, this time at a Dicos I knew I would get a curry. I don’t know about anyone else but when I go to a fast food restaurant, well, the one thing I expect it to be is……er………fast?

I  stood in one of two queues. I had one woman in front of me and there seemed to be rather a lot in the other queue. Eventually I could only assume the waitress working the till I was at wasn’t in fact taking orders so changed lanes and went to the back of the other line. Now by this time, that one wasn’t moving either. New arrivals, on seeing a long queue and one with just one woman in it, naturally stood behind her, leaving me smugly chuckling inside and waiting for their reaction to not being served. So far I had waited fifteen minutes and my only movement had been sideways.

Then the first in my queue was gone, leaving me with just one in front. Hooray! But then the same happened in the queue I vacated ten minutes previously! Not only that, she WAS taking orders! I reckon she was going out each time to catch, kill and pluck the bloody chickens. Eventually I got my meal but only after all the latecomers in my original line had received theirs.

Anyway I have now decided that at 25y for a soup (basically seaweed and bits of egg someone has boiled a kettle and poured water over) and a partitioned curry with chicken and rice in one bit, sauce in another, sweet corn, carrots and disgustingly hard beans a further one and some unidentifiable British Racing green bits in the final one - it is in fact shit. Especially when you consider a perfectly acceptable one is available one bus stop away for 16y - and you can smoke in there. The problem is, with all the stairs to negotiate on the BRT it puts me off combining eating and shopping and anyway I take a cab home when I have heavy bags and six or eight bottles of wine are heavy.

So last night I really tried to go to bed earlier but at midnight I was still wide awake. Then I realised that by getting back into a normal pattern I might find myself falling asleep before this weekend’s rugby starts so comforted myself with that.

Of course today I continued in the vein of indolence I have adopted even more so of late and never cooked. I did though make the intended cheese run and deliberately delayed departure until 1600 so that I could find somewhere to eat near there. The shopping was decent in the context of western produce in Lanzhou, I got my cheese, tinned tomatoes (love them on toast), processed peas and some pasta sauces, all of which bar the peas I used to get in RT Mart in Chizhou. 200y poorer, I left in search of dinner and found a small café. The only pictures of food were of pizzas and a steak. I thought the pizzas looked a lot like the ones in my curry place here but opted for a steak with extra chips, thinking the steak would come with spaghetti as it so often does here.

Now this place appeared to be somewhere that high school students go after school, order a drink and do their homework. Certainly there were half a dozen doing so at the time. I also experienced two “firsts”. One was being given a complimentary coffee in one of those things that resemble the drinking beakers for toddlers with a lid and a spout for sucking that are so beloved of places such as Starsucks. With it being really hot I could only take a small sip but I thought my palate must be very jaded because the coffee tasted uncommonly like orange.

It WAS orange. Red hot orange.

Then the second “first” came. One of the students doing her homework and with her back to me said, “Excuse me?”
“Yes?”
“Would you mind not smoking please?”
This rather took me aback and I replied
“I’m not.”

Anyway the steak was the usual plastic offering and it did in fact come with chips so I couldn’t finish the side order of chips (which were quite good-sized crinkle cut jobs) but I filled myself up. The black pepper sauce was excellent and it was only towards the end of my respite there that I spotted the name of the place. It was another branch of my curry restaurant! I could have had a curry for a lot less than I paid for the steak! At least I know for next time.

Also a student broke off from her homework to assist me when I was asking for salt. I now know it is “yan”. I did wonder if maybe pepper was “yin” but no, it is hujiao or Jiao. I seem to be keeping up with my recent progress of learning one new Chinese word a week!

But then Jiao An is good morning so when I greet a class am I saying pepper morning or good pepper?