Sold Out Before Noon

We were back at the fish restaurant yesterday.  My brother in law’s joint there at the New World Mall in Wang Jing.  Everyone must be over-the-river and through on home for yesterday as the streets were vacant.  The restaurant was vacant too.  A few people any rate, but never a good site to see if you’re the proprietor. 

The cab dropped me off at the landmark Starbucks.  No one was inside.  I knew the restaurant was down stairs somewhere.  I took the steps down to tight line up of small unattractive food stalls.  This wasn’t it.  I popped back up, and tried to walk the parameter of the mall, looking for another basement entrance until my brother in-law suggested I walk back down the stairs I’d just come from.  I did this and went left this time and found myself in the back exit of the basement supermarket.  I went out the front door, past the check out counters, feeling unnecessarily suspicious and there across the hall was the river fish joint. 

We got practical this time.  We gotta open one of these somewhere in New York.  No one has fish like this in New Paltz.  How much are those ridiculous sampo*  machines you have to cook the fish.  People would come just to check out the machine.  Our problem is bones.  Americans hate little bones.  Some fool’ll be gabbing his throat mid-meal and they’ll close it as a safety hazard.

My wife and her brother want to talk all night.  There’s a certain kind of language that only exists between siblings.  I’d like to do the same if I was with my sister.  My daughter and I say we’re ready to go, for the fifth time.  “you stay and enjoy yourself.”  But first we got a text.  We’re to find moon cakes, for the older one. 

I took my little one back, past the sampo, through the supermarket gate, past the unattractive food stalls and up into Starbucks.  “Hi.  Have any of those promotional Mid Autumn moon cakes left for sale?”  “No.  We were sold out before noon.”  Right.  Back down stairs, and over to the supermarket’s ‘bakery’ section.  We joined a pulsing mob around the counter where it looked like you could order moon cakes.  Most people were milling or accompanying and before long we’d bought up some sesame and some mango moon cakes.  I can’t imagine why she wants these.  Must be sentimentality.

*  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilmarinen#/media/File:Gallen_Kallela_The_Forging_of_the_Sampo.jpg