The Philadelphia Story (pt. 7 - Jellyfish Heaven)

May I be completely candid with you? Please? I'll buy you one of those shiny mylar balloons you like so well. Thanks. Here goes:

Call me a bigot, if you will, but I've never really understood the allure of Chinese food. I like dumplings at least as much as the next guy; steamed, fried, I'll eat 'em until I've eaten several too many. And cold sesame noodles? There was a time, in college, when I'd have gladly eaten nothing but. I'm sure there are a dozen other Chinese dishes that delight my finicky palate, too, but there are many, many more that, at best, do nothing for me, quite a number of which make me ill to even consider. The problem, you see, is that uniquely Chinese mania of submerging a high percentage of their menu items beneath a shimmering sea of viscous brown slime. Maybe I was conditioned early in life by that public service cartoon they ran on Saturday mornings with the lifeguad (I believe his name was Louie) who rescued a potato from drowning in a pool of sauce. I'm still not entirely sure why oversaucing one's food was considered a great enough peril to America's youth for it to merit its own PSA, and, for that matter, nor I am sure why we needed that other PSA with the cartoon cowboy who suggested we eat more cheese, but I do know that I am a product of my upbringing, sure as I know that Scrappy Doo's plucky bravado always helped save the day, lame a character as he may have been. Which is all to say, once again, that I'm not crazy about Chinese food, and thus it was that I held my optimism in abeyance that cold, shitty night, as we stepped out of the van and bolted throgh the rain across the street to the North Sea Seafood Restaurant*.

And here, I think, is as good a place as any to end this chapter of our story, as nothing all that interesting happened that night. Perhaps the tea ceremony was interesting, but I cannot rightly say, as I didn't bother to weave my way to the front of the big room and watch it. Some of the food was noteworthy, I guess, like the surprisingly tasty jellyfish, or the shark fin soup, which was essentially a bowlful of that glutinous brown sauce of which I'm so fond, but most of it was just food, ranging in likeability from great to my being unable to even look at it, which I think is all one can hope for in a traditional, family-style, thirteen course Chinese banquet. The conversation at our table was all very lively and very enjoyable, which hardly makes for a good story. I guess the only slightly funny thing that happened was when, at some point fairly late in evening, Erik and Noriko's giant baby was plunked into my arms, and I sat for a while making faces at it, much to the surprise of certain women in attendence. When the novelty of me holding a baby wore off and everyone looked away, I drilled a knuckle into his fat little arm, raising a nice little red wheal, just to prove to myself that I hadn't gone soft in my old age.

Eventually, we went back to the hotel and I drank in the lounge with strangers until they closed up for the night.
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(Coming soon: another entry that brings us closer to the end.)

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* I think that's what it was called. Do you really care? I don't.