as always.
we had sichuan food tonight for linda's going-away. i've decided not to go to hangzhou tomorrow because i have to concentrate on booking hotels for vietnam. i've gotten dinged and cancelled and everything else you can possibly imagine because of tet. sucks.
i love all the different things you try in sichuan food, plus the spiciness. but there's this little, very strongly-flavored spice they use (alvin says it's called mala) that looks like a mini caper but explodes in your mouth and makes your tongue numb. i called it nasty shit berry. i really dislike the flavor, i have an aversion to it. it's like eating a solid ball of bathroom cleaner-flavored listerine. we had some good dishes - duck blood in hot spicy oily soupy sauce, fried chicken pieces buried in chiles (you literally have to dig them out), pork slices with cucumber that you dip in garlicky oily sauce, rabbit with chiles, eggplant stuffed with goose (that was really good), mah po dofu sichuan style (aka dusted with crushed mala), and i tried tac's sea horse with bull penis soup. tasted like chicken soup like mom used to make (no, really). sichuan food is really tasty, but as you may have noticed, most things are drowned in hot spicy oil, so it's definitely not for people on a diet or who can't eat hot stuff. i couldn't even eat the dan dan mian because there was a huge dollop of crushed mala paste on top and i couldn't hang.
tomorrow i have to call vietnam and book hotels, run to xintiandi and buy a usb flash to back up my files, and work more on my short stories. i decided that i would try writing a collection of short stories to get published. after hemming and hawing and waiting for the writing addiction to hit me again, i decided that i should just... start writing. and so i did, and here we go. let you know how that goes.
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