For practically every morning of my stay at Huizhou, I had dim sum for breakfast. So by the time I ended my vacation, I was pretty sick of dim sum because it was the only thing my family was willing to eat. I would have arguments with my mother over food because nobody was willing to try something different. I traveled over an ocean to try new things, not to have the same thing. This was one of the things that you could say irritated me the most during my two month stay in China.
Everyone we knew was invited to have breakfast together because the relatives from overseas came a.k.a. my mother and I. For some strange reason, my grandma took her sweet time preparing herself when she was the one who was responsible for getting seating in the restaurant. Whatever it was, we made and we ate. I don't even remember where we ate at or what we ate at all. I think it was just a huge variety of dim sum, some familiar and some not.
We went over to my uncle Kai's house for a long talk to which I spent most of my time sitting there and being bored. There was really nothing for me to do and the conversation was not intended for me to participate. Then a couple of us (one of my uncles, uncle Kai, my mother and I plus some other people) decided to go on a little trip out of the blue. It was a 3 hour car ride to Shi Li Yin Tan (十里银滩), a beach resort pretty much. So many people come up to you trying to sell houses and it's pretty annoying. They're really desperate to sell and these houses ain't worth it. There isn't accessible transportation and there's nothing interesting in the area in the first place other than a beach. Plus not so far away is a highly polluted city.
That night we went to eat at a place near that area. What a terrible choice. It was clearly one of the worst places to eat, but now that I've been there, I can write about how terrible it is. It's kind of weird, but in a way these experiences make life more interesting. All these restaurants are open air restaurants and the manager is always coming up to you to try to get you to go to their store. It's pretty intimidating too as a foreigner because they speak a local dialect and we just stand out too much. Luckily we have uncle Kai to guide us. He ain't afraid of you and you can't jip him. The other uncle kept saying that this area is great for seafood, but we all knew better and all uncle Kai could do was to take a gamble.
Uncle Kai picked out a place and took care of most of the ordering since he knew what was worth trying and what was plain garbage. To be honest, everything sucked that night and I can't blame uncle Kai. I already mentioned this was an open air restaurant so maybe some of you are envisioning something like small fancy tables on the brick roadside enjoying a shrimp scampi and a glass of white wine. What we got was a large round table covered with a cracked disposable table cloth and cracked table ware. Uncle Kai's cup was not only chipped, but had a hole on the bottom. We were given an appetizer of an odd pickle and some weak tea. The air stank from the nearby sea. It was a terrible sea to begin with. The grounds we stood on were covered with litter and plastered with stains.
Our orders that night came with a fish soup. some stir fried squid, small conches, two kinds of shrimp, and an oyster omelette. With a questionable establishment comes questionable food. They messed up our soup order so we had to wait for them to change it. They switched the fish to another fish. First came the oyster omelette. It's such a popular street food in Taiwan and throughout Asia. You would think they wouldn't fuck it up over here. Hell yeah, they fucked it up and they fucked it up big time. That omelette was suppose to be crispy and what I got was raw oyster and runny egg. I didn't realize until I bit into something that was too liquid-like. I stuck with the squid that night because it was savory and didn't have any weird smells. The shrimp we had was the regular shrimp you eat and mantis shrimp also known as pissing shrimp. The best thing that dinner was the regular shrimp because it was fresh and clean. I could have starved that night if I didn't eat the shrimp. The mantis shrimp was a huge fucking disappointment. It had a nasty smell to it and didn't even taste good. To think that the bill that night was fucking huge over some stinking seafood. It wasn't worth it at all.
To top it all off, we went to see the sea at night which was nothing more than an unfinished public space, litter, and the stinkin' sea. It serious stunk of fishiness. Not pleasant at all. It makes the goddess statue look like a goddess of garbage city.
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