Today, my mom’s friends were going to take her to dim sum. The kids and I tagged along. Mun came to pick us up this morning and we were going to sneak away from our mom’s today for what is the first of many interesting meals to come. We got to the dim sum restaurant where the friends had booked a private room. The kids, Mun and I sat at a separate small table, so we would be able to do as we pleased. We planned on sticking around for a little while and then leaving to pick up Mun’s sister (Hung), Wah and Kathy and go eat lunch.
At this point, I had come to realize that people in China never really seem to work. They get three hours for lunch! This is a drawback to the day when most people used to ride bicycles and would ride home of lunch, take a nap and then ride back to work. Although these days most people no longer ride bicycles, they still get three hours for lunch. Additionally, most of the people that I have met that are still working (retirement age is 50) attend multiple meetings every day. So, Mun, Hung (who works next to the restaurant), the kids and I went to pick up Wah, then Kathy and we headed for the outskirts (at least it was the outskirts to me) of the city. I still have no idea how the streets in this city work.
We drove and we drove until we got to this area under a bridge. We drove under the bridge for a bit and came to this clearing. Mun pulls into this clearing and there was a building with a bunch of tables inside and outside. We sit at the table outside and they start ordering food while I take the kids to see what we are eating today.
They waitress brings out a cart with a bunch of raw stuff on it; chunks of emu meat, slices of emu gizzards, pieces of emu intestines, emu meatballs and some emu vegetables (OK, so it was just plain lettuceJ). They then brought out a pot of hot soup and put it on a burner and we started cooking everything in the soup. When the soup started to boil back up, I had my first bite of emu gizzard and emu meat. And wow, was it good!!! Does emu taste like chicken? No! I felt that the meat was more like a tender steak than poultry. The kids ran around freely in the area around the restaurant and would not eat when I told them that we were eating a friend of one of the emus that we saw in the pens. However, after some negotiations, they both agreed that if they got to run around, each time they came back to the table, they would have to eat one piece of meat. Both kids tried the emu and thought it was really good too.
As we were heading back to city center, the others started discussing a trip to Macau. They were planning on going to Macau on the 18th, the day we were scheduled to return from Beijing. I had always wanted to go to Macau was never had the chance to. So, we decided that we could go to Macau on the 19th of September and head to Hong Kong directly from there.
That evening we went to a restaurant in Pan Yu, which is an area in the outskirts of Guangzhou. Pan Yu is surrounded by rivers that branch from the Pearl River (Zhu Jiang). The food in Pan Yu is more interesting that the food that one gets in the city. The restaurant we went to today had tanks and tanks of fresh seafood, fished daily from the waters surrounding the restaurant itself, talk about fresh. The taste test item for me at this meal was snake. The snake had a chewy texture (no, it did not taste like chicken), there was really little meat on each piece of snake and there was more bone and spine. Additionally, we ordered 3 types of shrimp, fish, eel and goose. The three types of shrimp ranged from tiny river shrimp, medium sized shrimp (what we would usually get at a supermarket) to large shrimp (about the size of a crawfish). The shrimp was totally amazing and yes, I was stuffed. The eel was the smallest one available and it weighed closed to 5 pounds.
The beds at the hotel were extremely firm, as a lot of Chinese people still sleep on wood boards. Since I was sharing the bed with one of the kids, I found myself sleeping on my side a lot and during this night, I woke to find that I had a bruise on my right hip L.