Closed / open
(Top left – right: me and Green warrior, hotpot, me posing with Jackie Chan cut outs: new mall, Suzhou)
Sometimes in the evenings, if we’re feeling in the right mood, Ying and I go on short e-bike excursions to seek out new places to eat or buy food, or just to visit. It turns out that we arrived at a shopping centre the night before it was due to open officially; the consequence being that it was crawling with workmen and only the supermarket and a couple of bread shops were open. The rest of the shops were teeming with people, busily folding clothes or tapping brackets into walls. Amongst all the dust and construction and frantic activity, some neatly dressed girls were proffering free samples of various bakery products, which we readily sampled. I tried floss roll and chortled at some of the names of the breads; ‘Eggstraordinary’ was a sterling effort, eclipsed only by ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Bacon’.
On the first night, continuing my Jackie Chan theme, an entire full size display loomed into view, complete with not one but four huge cutouts of Jackie looking very pleased with himself indeed. I couldn’t resist sidling up and having a snap. I just can’t imagine George Clooney or Tom Cruise advertising hair products with their entire body. We decided that based on some purchases made that night that the next day we would return, only to discover an elaborate opening ceremony in progress with live bands. We were too desperate for food to join the crowds, so ran for the green ‘Terracotta’ warrior on the fourth floor. (I would like to add that Ying refused to have his picture taken with him so I had to concede defeat. I’m looking uncomfortable because there were several interested parties, including a waitress watching the whole thing.) This being the only restaurant that had managed to open on time, we were prepared to settle for whatever was on the menu – which turned out to be exclusively hotpot. So we had that. I love hotpot; it’s such a lot of fun to drop different things into the soup; prawns, coriander, mushrooms of various sizes and shapes, tofu, meat, leaves… The service was a bit shaky on opening night, but we had a very nice waitress called Paul. In the UK, I would assume she would have borrowed a name tag, but here I worry that her English name may actually be Paul.
Hotpot is also one of my favorites!!! grrr…I envy you. Next time you could try the spicy hotpot (Ma La Huo Guo). Can you take spicy food??
Oh yes! Very well now, I accidentally ate a super spicy chilli last night in a Bangkok soup and it was painful, but I didn’t break a sweat. Phew! I won’t make that error again though.
Jackie is not that tall!
Look at the size of his head – they’ve just scaled him up! Poor wee Jackie…
[...] or steamboat. I love it. In case you’ve never heard me go on and on about it, this is one of my Chinese hotpot excursions. Later we will be preparing to count down to Chinese New Year – by the way, have a good Chinese [...]