when does the flu have the flu?

... so i'm calmly listening to rammstein (if you can call till lindemann's dulcet tones growling about.... eh....you dont want to know, trust me...) on the train this morning, and i happen to glance over at the person sitting across the aisle from me, who is reading a copy of today's courier mail (brisbane newspaper). and on the front page is the dramatic headline.... "DEFENCELESS!" and this picture that was so grainy it could have been made from individual grains as far as i'm aware... of whatever we were DEFENCELESS against. looks like a medical thing to me... and then i read a smaller printed headline mentioning something about swine flu.

so i'm all....hmm...will have to read that when i get to work (we get the papers at work every day) .... and i continue letting angry german guitar riffs shred my ears....

so anyhoo....i get to work and have a look at this article after saying "where's the paper.....apparently there's a swine flu coming to kill us..." and then i'm skimming the article and going "cool... bacon is going to be our flu lord!" and trust me i was thinking things about sour cream that u probably wouldn't repeat in polite company... but anyway...

where was i? oh yes....swine flu.

remember that bird flu thing a couple of years back? and that other thing... has the same name as that horrible tasting soft drink i've never really liked.... SARS.... that's the one.... apparently if you got that one you just up and died in like hours. or something. or was that bird flu... or did bird flu turn humans into chickens and make them lay eggs and nest... gee...i really don't remember..

they must be bored for news...i saw a paper mention osama bin laden today. OBL hasn't been mentioned in a while, let's chuck him in for a laugh and see if anyone notices.. shall we speculate as to his living status....is he alive or dead....he looked a bit sick....oh but wait no one's seen him in over 5 years at least and the same video seems to be popping up time and time again conveniently after some thing thats named a terrorist attack... does anyone actually still care?

so when does the flu have the flu? when you're giving your kids too much money for the tuck shop/canteen at school and they're not getting enough exercise.

make sense?

exactly.

Yum Cha at Chinahouse

...god doesn't that just scream RESTAURANT REVIEW!!!!!!

anyway. you and i both know we do shit differently here at TFP.

ANYhoo. I got to work ridiculously early as usual. so i'm hunting around for a new place to try for lunch. i work in the middle of chinatown, so chinese/asian restaurants are aplenty. my only other options are subway or fucking mcdonalds which fucked my order up for dinner.... yet again. must stop going there as it is evil anyways and not in a good way.

So i'm wandering around wickham st, looking at the place next to the Happy Chef BBQ, and i get my phone out of my pocket to check the time. I see I have a call coming through so I answer it. It's my friend Lee from work, and the conversation goes something like this:

ME: (answering phone in the midst of traffic whizzing past me) HELLO?
Lee: Hello...
ME: Where are you?
Lee: I'm at home...where are you?
ME: Uh.. i'm on wickham st standing outside the Superbowl....trying to find somewhere to have lunch.
Lee: Oh. Ok, i'm just getting ready for work...
ME: Well, do you want to get lunch or something?
Lee: Sure, where do you want me to meet you
ME: eh, I'll meet you outside the hotel (he lives in a hotel smack in the middle of the valley)
Lee: Ok, see you in a few minutes.

we hang up and i wander up brunswick st to meet him. so we're chatting away and walking back down brunswick st and Lee is all...so where do you want to eat...and im like... eh.. why don't we go try the Yum Cha at Chinahouse in the chinatown mall? We had gone there the other night for dinner, and the food wasn't bad, although a bit on the pricey side (i dunno...how much does one normally pay for decent chinese food? can you tell i'm fucking sheltered???) but they also do a Yum Cha lunch. (see here for a rundown on what Yum Cha is) I hadn't had Yum Cha for years, and I know it's something Lee hadn't experienced before, so we went up to the restaurant.

we sat down and ordered tea, and then patiently waited for the first trolley to roll by. we had... steamed bbq pork buns (my favourite yum cha dish other than maybe deep fried squid...), sweet pork dumplings, chicken rice flour noodle/roll and i had the deep fried sesame prawn roll, as Lee doesn't eat seafood.

so we ate our meal and drank tea, Lee commenting that the tea was nice and refreshing. the last thing we ordered was off a trolley full of desserts... Mango Pancake. OH MY GOD! This dish was like sex on a plate... a thin pancake... filled with cream and mango ... served cold... but so delicate and so light... i said to Lee.... this pretty much beats fried ice cream.... and he looked at me like... WTF... fried ice cream.... so i had to explain the concept to him... and he was like...ohhhh ok.

Now... for value for money... it's pretty good. the standard dishes are $3.80 each.. and by the time we left, we had paid around $26 for the 2 of us... which is pretty damn good if you ask me. And there are like 3 or 4 of each item on the one plate...so it's not like it's $3.80 for one item.

Will definitely be going back there... I think it was well worth it, and the experience reminded me of being a teenager when my mum used to take me for yum cha in perth... :)