TRIGGERING PODUNKUM

I headed over to Chinatown recently for some essential groceries. It remains my favourite neighborhood, because it's small, tight, and home-like. It has everything I need except cheese and yoghurt. Also, it's long-time familiar, there are fewer stupid white people without masks, and no one makes fun of my accent.

But it's changing. The pandemic has forced many businesses to close.

After my purchases, I filled a pipe and headed down to Montgomery Street in the Financial Disctrict. Which is also changing, except that I like that. If any neighborhood used to be filled with suburbanite yutzes, it was there, and their absence improves it immensely.

Some of the businesses in C'town which I hope will survive are old familiar places, such as several on Jackson Street. Pictured below is where, in perhaps six months time, I shall meet John O. for a porkchop. Reason being that he hates the word "lunting". A lunt, he maintains, is a slow fuse, wick, or taper, perhaps used on occasion to light a pipe or cigar. As a verb (for ambling about with a smoke) he loathes it. I myself think it quite unnecessary also.
While wandering, I smoke.

THE NEW LUN TING CAFÉ

When I "lunt", it might on occasion be when heading toward a pork chop with sauce over rice, with a bowl of old fire soup, and a hot cup of Hong Kong Milk Tea.
After which I may take a walk with my pipe.
Which triggers suburbanites.

A woman at the New Lun Ting once marveled at my excellent Mandarin. Because what I spoke was NOT her language, Toishanese, but was never-the-less intelligible. In fact my Mandarin is bloody awful, and what I was speaking at the time was Cantonese.
My native language, Dutch, sounds much like Mandarin.
All those difficult sounds, man.

Surely a Caucasian trying to speak Chinese must be speaking Mandarin, yes?
Because it is inconceivable that intelligible language should erupt from his face.
Maybe he's just mush-mouthed clenching that pipe? Yes, that's probably it.

I'm always pleased as punch that people actually understand me there. It makes shopping and associating so much easier. And again, no one has ever commented on my accent in English, or told me I should go the hell back where I came from. Or bellyached vociferously about my pipe, which is icing on the cake.

You know, it's just not nice when inbred Jed from Podunkum Arkansas says something snotty about how I speak. Doesn't he have a Capitol Building somewhere to storm or something?
I'm probably not a nice person. Too harshly critical of my fellow citizens.
Probably because of my foreigness.


Lunch today was nasi goreng, a grilled sausage, and Gouda cheese.
My own private Amsterdam on a plate
With lots of sambal.

Now, tea, and a pipeful of a new tobacco.
Juno, for Savinelli by MacBaren.
Smells plummy.

TOBACCO INDEX


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