SMALL BITS AND PIECES

Yesterday's delicious lunch is not something that wins friends afterwards, so it is just as well that wandering around smoking my pipe was part of the programme.
That, also, does not favourably influence people.
Given that San Francisco hates tobacco.


Conflating two specific television advertisements yields "When people ask where I get my healthy glow from, I tell them I just microwaved some fish".

Which, to the uneducated palate, describes the food.


蒜香蝦醬肉粒炒飯
[Suàn xiāng xiā jiàng ròu lì chǎofàn: 'suen heung haa-jeung yiuk nap chaau faan']

Fried rice with little pork bits, shrimp paste, and garlic. Looked like crap, smelled "good", and tasted like heaven. It gave me a stomach ache because I ate too much, along with hot sauce.

Like baked Portuguese chicken rice (焗葡國雞飯 'guk pou gwok gai faan'), which is also available there, this is not food to impress the suburban white people, it's just stuff we eat.


At this time of year Chinatown is filled with foreigners -- there were well over a dozen of them up at the cashier's desk trying to pay for something with a credit card -- but none in the actual dining hall.

Push past, carefully but loud enough over the gibberant din enunciating 'entschuldigen sie bitte', 'excusez moi', 'scusi', 'izvinite pozhalusta', and 'atsiprasau' -- because you do not know where these pimply pink freaks are from -- and take a seat at the back table, which will give you a great view of the place while making it possible to listen in on the two middle aged ladies animatedly discussing a relative who bought a car.

Their conversation was strangely fascinating.
I got distracted by my food, oh boy yes.
When I looked up they were gone.



Sometimes the place seems rather understaffed. Not so when I got there, but when I left both Ah Ping and Anna had their hands full. Twice or three times as many Cantonese, at least five Mandarin speakers, and two ladies (one adult, one minor) who may have been speaking Russian and played with each others hair.



The word 粒 ('naap'; lì in Mandarin) is a very useful word. It is the classifier for rice, granules, grains, seeds, pills, hailstones, pebbles, and things of that general ilk, along with metres, some fruits.
Basically, a fragment or a small piece.





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