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Sunday 4 November 2012

short-term memory loss

…is what you get when you do too many things while on holiday and this is why I need to remember to update my blog every single day when I’m traveling.
So this post is for October 30, 2012, the memory of which is somewhat hazy in my brain.
I do recall going to Piccadilly Circus and doing something or another… Oh, no, wait. I remember now.
First we went to Brixton Market. It’s a huge… er, market, and it’s mainly to supply the Afro-Caribbean population in London. There were so many spices and curries, and finally — real butcher shops that were part of a market. I don’t quite know how to explain this, but in Beijing, whenever you went to the “butcher’s”, you’d go to a wet market (which looks like this, except it’s usually dirtier and the floor is actually wet… hence the name) and go to the stall that you usually go to and then you get the meat that you want. I feel like in these large, developed cities, the butchers are always either in the supermarkets (it’s way too clean to actually be a butcher’s if you think about it) or they’ve got their own little shop, which is acceptable and all, but it doesn’t give me the comforting, grutty (yes I made that word up) feel that these sketchy wet markets do. It was a pretty cool market and I bought back some chilis that are apparently really insanely spicy for my Nigerian buddies back at AC.

Brixton Market. It was a lot brighter than it seems in this picture.
Then we headed to Warren Street and we ate at Yvonne’s brother’s restaurant, Mushu. It’s an Asian fusion restaurant and the dumplings were decent compared to what I usually had back home ;) My standards are set super high since I grew up on that food, and my ayi (nanny/housemaid/cook all rolled into one; she basically raised me) made dumplings (jiaozi / 饺子) for me quite often, as well as wontons (馄饨), laobing (烙饼), shaobing (烧饼), and hubing (I have no idea how to write this in Chinese).
My goal is to learn how to make a lot of Chinese food while I’m here at AC. I always felt that I had no time to do this kind of stuff back in Beijing, but I’ve kind of realized that I have a lot of free time here; I just don’t know how to use my time wisely, because… well, we’ll save that for another post. Just to keep you hanging.
Anyway. Then we went to Chinatown, where I bought a lot of noodles, a 6kg bag of rice, ramen, fish/beef balls, and ate some more dandy food. Such as a pineapple bun. Damn, those are good. I miss those. It’s weird how much you crave things that you know you won’t have access to. #firstworldproblems
We returned to the flat after that, because Yvonne had a massage client, and we ended up having this random fusion of food for dinner… which tasted great :) Fried rice, this satay vermicelli salad thing that I must get the recipe for, and more food I can’t remember.
That was basically it for Tuesday. Now I have to write the post for Wednesday :)

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