The Dancing Noodles
Day 734
A noisy bullet train, meeting Dave and the Dancing Noodles today.
Our next bullet train was taking us to Kunming where we were staying with Dave, a close friend of my sister Dawn’s, who we have met a few times. Up until now, our train rides have been very peaceful, however this time we had a young child rather distraught a few seats behind us and a very loud lady to our left. She reminded us of the British Comedian Dom Joly in Trigger Happy, shouting down his gigantic mobile phone. Not only was she deafening, but she also had loads of bags filled with various foods and kept putting one of these either on the floor in front of us or on our table, despite having room on the floor in front of her. How bizarre.
We reached Kunming, and there was Dave to greet us. We settled into his spacious apartment, discovered that Dave and Tim are reading the same book about Genghis Kahn, of all the billions of books out there.
Later we went to the new mall to eat. Dave wanted to take us to a particular restaurant as the service is exemplary. It certainly was. We ordered hotpot minus the blow your head off spicy sauce that we had in Chengdu. The ordering was much easier as well with Dave’s aid. He has lived in China for the last seven years and takes lessons learning Chinese. We are so impressed with how he chats away with people in the local language; what a skill to have.
Dave suggested we added “dancing noodles” to our list of ingredients. Our food arrived promptly with a young man holding thick strips of dough. He then proceeded to hand-stretch the mixture into noodles, whizzing the skipping rope dough around his head and behind, splitting this in half lengthways into thin scrumptious noodles and put it in our hot soup. What fun!
After our delicious and entertaining dinner, we wandered around the mall and came across two baby alpacas. Hang on a minute, what country are we in? It was like déjà vu from our time in Peru. Inside this establishment was a large birdcage with budgerigars all piling on top of one another to get to the birdseed in a tray. The strange thing was that there was another tray of budgie food behind this scrambling crowd with just a couple of birds pecking away in peace. Oh, we do love seeing the weird and wonderful.
We returned to Dave’s spending the rest of the evening chatting about the wonders of China and how Dawn is so similar to me. Ok, Ok, she is the eldest – I am like her. That ok, Dawn?