February 22, 2004
Definitely not green cheese
Oyster sauce, Full Kee Restaurant
(I'm posting no street information, they're crowded enough as it is)
Today for brunch, we had dim sum at the Full Kee: jasmine tea, turnip cakes, potstickers with shrimp and chives, seaweed salad with rice vinegar and sesame seeds, sticky rice in lotus leaf with meats in, fried sesame-mochi balls filled with mung bean paste. I could go on, but the menu recitation is making me hungry all over again. The last few items you can actually see in the photograph, the principle subject of which is the face in the oyster sauce the man wanted for his turnip cakes. It looks like the Man in the Moon or, now that I'm thinking about it, the rabbit making mochi that the Japanese say they see in the moon.
After brunch, we proceeded to troll around looking for things to photograph, with frequent interruptions from the man's work. Somebody was doing something for which they needed an inordinate amount of handholding, so the cell phone was chirping constantly. And the beseeching was always along these lines:
Coworker: "O! Oz, the Great and Terrible! We are having a telephone conference at noon and we need you to intercede with the Wicked System Management People of the West."
Oz (the man): "No. And it's five past now."
Coworker: "O! Oz, the Great and Terrible! We left you voice mail about it [five minutes ago]. Do you have access to your voice mail?"
Oz: "No. I'm on the phone."
Like that. All afternoon. We still managed to head out across the river into Southside, stopping at the floodwall for a few pictures of the skyline until the smell of the paper factory drove us further on into Manchester and beyond. We drove through neighborhoods with many run-down trailer parks, used tire retailers ($10 and up!), Latino markets, a Korean senior center, and convenience stores with interesting names: In & Out and Grab & Go. Seriously, "Grab & Go"? That is asking to be robbed.
The man says, "Driving around in this neighborhood, I really want to shower and shave. And change clothes. If the car breaks down here, I don't want us to look like we fit in."
"I don't look like I fit in. I'm wearing sneakers, see, and they aren't even platform sneakers. And I have all my teeth." I hold up my foot.
The man rebuts me. "They have all their teeth."
"Yeah, in a bag. They don't have them all in one place." (I am awful. He laughs anyway.)
A retro outer space theme developed as we worked our way along Jefferson Davis Highway and Hopkins Road, but I can't post everything today. Until I learn more about photo editing and figure out how to reduce the file sizes, I have imposed a one picture per day limit on myself so I don't run through my year's worth of server space in one month, and so that people with dial-up will not hate me. Besides, it forces me to be selective. I know I'm just another asshole with a digital camera, but you haven't seen any pictures of my cats. Yet.
526 words | February 22, 2004 08:12 PM | Shutterbug