365 Pink Feather Boas All in a Row - Day 165 (Monday 14 June 2010) : Adventures With My Guy

It seems to have been the (long) weekend for it.

After our fabulous new cafe discovery in Stanmore on Saturday, we decided to strike out for parts unknown - well not completely but it sounds dramatic doesn't it, with some Hitchcockian suspense promised - and go to Norton St, Leichhardt for dinner instead of Erskineville/Newtown or Dulwich Hill, which while lovely, are where we always end up.

But after the time it took us to find a hotel we wanted to stay at in Melbourne, when I head down this weekend to meet his family (which is simultaneously exciting as I have always loved the idea of in laws, and nerve-wracking), we decided to stay a little closer to home but still branch out and ended up settling on a Chinese restaurant in Marrickville Road. I usually avoid Chinese restaurants because I grew up in the country where the Chinese food was cliched and very Aussie (I do have affection for them though and one year even ordered a whole dinner of cliche classics with an old high school friend one Boxing Day) but we decided in the spirit of adventure to go in and see what happened.

If it was cliched, it was cliched, and we'd just laugh and make the best of it. But it turned out to be reasonably authentic, with a number of Chinese families eating at scattered tables, and we settled on shredded beef (thinking it would be like the Vietnamese version which is light and healthy) and Shandong Chicken, which had no description, but which fell into the category of "why the hell not give it a shot?". That was the motif of the night after all! We did go with one small cliche - seafood fried rice but its yummy so it doesn't count! - figuring that all the other food was non-cliched so mission accomplished.

It didn't quite turn out to be as healthy as planned - both dishes were deep-fried though delicious - but we had a lovely time with each other as always, loved trying somewhere new (even if it wasn't as ground breaking as Cafe Perci on the Saturday), and had a blast reaffirming our commitment to trying new things no matter how they turn out.

ADDENDUM: We got home just in time to see Q & A, the ABC's weekly panel talkfest, which featured the usual varied guest list - in this case including journalist David Marr, Federal Environment Minister, Peter Garrett, and Liberal Helen Coonan - and one of the topics debated was ethical treatment of animals. One of the things that Q & A features a live Twitter feed where they pluck a few of teh 100s of Tweets made and run them on a ticker tape like feed across the bottom of the screen. Not expecting to make the cut, I commented on the ethical treament of animals question and lo and behold, made it on screen! Very exciting stuff (even if some Neanderthalic fool felt the need to respond to me on Twitter itself with a disparaging response. Quite why people need to be so vicious online is beyond me.) !!