We were in China. The real thing, too, not just somewhere that tourists thronged to. Coming to Canton had been a nightmarish ride in a large bus. When we finally got to the hotel, a giant, sanitised, plush western franchise, I was lurching, down the steps, across the pavement, into the lobby. The ground under my feet was waving, the air shimmered in sparkly green and grey spots, my sinuses shrieked with the onslaught of air-freshener they had been subjected to. Propping me up and guiding my tottering self to my bed, my parents laughed, without any sympathetic feeling for my sorry state of semi-existence. But sleep, like Will Shakespeare said, had the habit of ravelling the sleeve of care - or, in my case, dispelling the biliousness. After a brief nap and wash up, I had confirmed that I was still alive.
The coffee shop was like all large luxury hotel coffee shops - anonymous, coldly air-conditioned, vast, almost empty and comfortingly familiar. The menu arrived and I read through it all, shuddering faintly at any mention of anything exotic. Fresh rock shrimp was passed over, sushi was scorned and King Pao anything unexamined. What appealed was good old stodge, something that would soothe my stomach and my frazzled nerves. Pizza yelled for attention. "Pizza," I stated firmly, ignoring all suggestions for eating in China as the Chinese do as mere bits of frivolity. But persuasion is nine-tenths of the appetite and I compromised, settling for an Oriental-sounding topping of Chinese sausage. When the pizza arrived, it was steaming hot, molten cheese blanketing the whole, delicate rounds of rose-gold meat scattered over the top. By colour and configuration, the discs were not pepperoni. A nibble confirmed something more exotic, a vague sweetness sparked with a touch of ginger and a whiff of pepper. It went down smoothly, softening my serrated synapses with gentle flavours and mellow textures.
But by the next morning, I was ready to go wild, gastronomically speaking. After another protracted battle with the airlines trying to get tickets into Wuhan, where we needed to be, we found ourselves back at the hotel, exhausted and hungry. In the lobby stood a large signboard, inviting visitors to a dimsum festival at the main restaurant. We followed out tummies and found ourselves in a huge room, tastefully decorated with streamers and flyers, all proclaiming what we guessed was "Greetings for Moon Festival". We were guided to a table and sat down, wondering what to do next. We sat and sat...and sat. No one came anywhere near us, though waiters pushing carts loaded with cane baskets rushed past us on all sides. I smiled tentatively at one or two and got harassed looks in return. Finally, after much more of this, along with a few near misses, when we got set to welcome some food to our table only to find it destined for someone else, we found a nice lady who spoke some vestige of English.
It got a little easier after that. While we still had no clue what she was telling us a lot of the time, we did understand that we would be fed soon and it had taken so long since we had not given the waiters a ticket which would allow us to be served. "Ah, so!" we all exclaimed, parents, myself, the lady and a few neighbouring tables. Ticket acquired and submitted, we were being served, in as much of a rush as the organised chaos that we had been watching all that time. There were little rice-paper pockets of vegetables, tiny envelopes of spiced meat, fragile fried wrappers stuffed with shrimp and who would guess what else. Every one had a special shape and filling - and significance, our helpful lady managed to tell us - and each was delicious. Having eaten our way through a panoply of bamboo baskets containing steaming yummies, we thanked the nice lady, all the now-beaming waiters and the hotel manager, who had finally come to everyone's rescue, when our lunch was almost over. Tummies leading, we trooped out, genteel burps orchestrating our exit, about four hours after we had gone in.
And we agreed, for once without argument, that eating dimsum in China was a very special experience.
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