dinner & grocery store & taxi story

today my roommate walked to a grocery store / department store near our house and then took a taxi home. but first we went to a restaurant that was near the store. when we walked into this shopping area, the ground was *entirely* torn up. they were replacing pipes under the ground and tile on top of the ground. there were only strips of dirt to walk on. it's kind of hard to describe. there were piles of dirt and broken tiles and concrete everywhere too. so we walked through this to the japanese ramen restaurant we had decided to go to for dinner.

when we entered the restaurant, there was no other customers there. two ladies stood there waiting for us to decide what to order (at another restaurant we went to another night, there were three waitresses that helped us the whole time we were there). the menu was only in japanese and chinese, but thankfully i could read some of it in japanese. i found the ramen section of the menu. there were about 20 different kinds, but i could only read about 4 of them. so i asked one of the ladies if she spoke japanese (in japanese) and she did speak a little, so i asked her to read a bunch of the other ones to me. we ordered one that sounded familar. when it came it was pretty good! it's cheaper to get noodles from our noodle place near the market that i wrote a post about another time, but i would still go to this place again sometime. i was thinking i could go down and order every type of ramen they had and probably like them all. ordering real ramen in a restaurant is *very* different from making the kind you can get in a package in the US for 25 cents or something and it takes three minutes to boil. that is not ramen.

anyway, then we went to the store and got some snacks and random other food we needed. on our way out, we passed through the security thing (that was the first time i noticed they had one in the grocery store!) and it went off! they made my roommate walk back through with the cart and it went off again. one of the employees took the cart through herself and nothing happened. when my roommate walked through by herself, it went off. so she showed them what was in her bag. she showed them our receipt. by this time, eeeeveryone at the checkout--employees and customers had stopped what they were doing and were watching us. a bunch of people had moved closer so they could get a better view of what was going on. the lady looked at what was in our cart and looked at our receipt. my roommate walked through the security thing again and nothing happened, and then the lady let us go. by that time there were about 50 people gathered around and watching what was going on, from a safe distance. i was trying not to laugh to much at how silly we must have looked. =) we have no idea why the security thing went off to begin with.

this last part is just to boast that i can now take a taxi home by myself whenever i want to, because i can now pronounce where i live. it's six words and if i say it with the wrong tones, the drivers don't know what i'm talking about. there was one time my roommate said it and i said it and the driver didn't understand us, and then we had to call a chinese friend to tell the driver where it was...however, the driver did understand me that time! after i said it several times. but since then i've been listening to them announce it on the bus before we get off, so now i know how to pronounce it...mostly. i only had to say it two times this time. =) i'll be very glad when i actually get to start chinese lessons and can maybe start to learn how to pronounce some things correctly! this should happen in september.

well, there are other taxi stories, but i can save those for another time.