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Longxiang Restaurant, on Dixon St opposite the cowboy (or where the Cowboy was), came highly recommended to me. The lovely Miss Fur eats her lunch there on a frequent basis (hey stalkers, she’s single!), and my father has told me a couple of times about how he took a couple of visiting Chinese dignitaries for dinner there and they returned three times during their visit, (having decided another Chinese restaurant they went to was rubbish).

And if real Chinese people from China like it, it must be good, authentic, and tasty, right? I decided to test it out for myself, having previously only tried takeaways that suffered from long delays before we got to eat them, which is hardly a sporting chance.

So after the Beckon VIP night, I grabbed my constant restaurant buddy/sister Karen, as well as the Wellingtonista’s Hadyn and the delightful Amy and set out to give it a go.

The menu is long – not cripplingly so, but enough that it’s easy to select one of each animal with different kinds of sauce. Collaborative ordering had us getting roast duck, Orange Beef, fish fillets with spicy sauce and chicken with ginger and spring onions, as well as rice, tea, vegetarian wontons and spring rolls, two Chinese beers and a cranberry juice.

I can’t say enough good things about the lovely woman who was serving us. She was friendly, helpful and really genuine-seeming. Lisa says that she knows her frequent customers’ names, and makes assumptions about their relationships. Brilliant. I love that in a place.

The atmosphere was fairly standard, pretty bland but that’s what you can expect.

So that leaves the food. How was it?

Well, I should probably say I have very Western tastes when it comes to Chinese food. I might avoid ordering Butter Chicken in Indian restaurants, but I do love me some Sweet’n Sour Pork. Therefore I was very very happy with the Orange Beef, which was battered and deep fried, served with a tangy sauce flecked with diced chillies, and holy crap, it was good. What appeared on first glance to be cellophane turned out to be shredded deep-fried spinach, and that was very very tasty too.

The filling in the vegetarian wontons was disappointing – I couldn’t tell if it was egg or tofu, but either way, it wasn’t my most favourite thing ever, but the spring rolls were crispy and yum.

The roast duck was exactly as it sounds – a plate of chunks of roast duck with crispy skin, served on canned pineapple. One of these days, I’m going to invent a boneless duck, because I am incredibly lazy. Or perhaps I’ll go back to Beijing Restaurant in Newtown for their shredded duck pancakes. You know, one or the other, whichever seems easiest at the time.

Meanwhile the fish and the chicken were quite bland, and suffered from too much cornflour goop sauce, while the rice was mushy and seemed more Japanese than Chinese.

If I went back, which I probably would, based on the awesomeness of the beef and the spring rolls, and how we hardly even had to turn over the lid of our tea pot to get more hot water (there’s a trick for you!), I would stick to the classic Westernised dishes and would no doubt be rewarded for that.

The bill came to $101.50 which was very reasonable, given that we couldn’t finish all the food.

9; Febuary, 1999
Voice Outside the Window: “Joanna, you bitch, let me into your house”

Me: “Shirley you fucking ugly hoe, I’m in the shower. It’s not 11.30 yet, so you’re just going to have to wait for me, dumb bitch”

Ahhhhhhhhh friends are so the shit, bro. It’s so much fun to yell abuse and have them know that you don’t mean it. Shirley had woken me up at 10am anyways ringing me to tell me what I was doing today. So I went back to sleep until 11am, timing myself perfectly to be clean and dressed by the time she got to my place, at the designated half hour. But did SHE stick to the schedule? Noooo!

I guess I shouldn’t complain about her though, given that she spent an hour tightening up my bed. See, who needs a man when you have a best friend with a tool kit instead? My headboard doesn’t rock anymore – well – much – so that’s a bonus. Now I can bring people home to it. Hahahahaha yeah, cos the fact that it was rickety was really the only thing stopping me. Honest it was.

Oh my god, I nearly forgot – two of the former tenants came around to ask for the landlord’s number. I so hope they weren’t checking us out for stuff to steal, but HA! if they try it, cos we got the locks changed. They said that they were going to come around on thursday night to take the weights bench, but then after asking if any guys lived here (“YES, three of them” trying to imply like they were big and would beat up any intruders) they said they’d leave it for them. So I gave him the landlord’s number, and their mail. One of them was actually quite cute. They laughed at all the mess and boxes in the hall when I told them that we’d moved in ages ago. It’s like “um, excuse me? you guys are the junkies. I laugh at you”. I didn’t say that though. I should have gotten a forwarding address off them for mail and our assorted weirdo visitors, but I was too shocked at meeting the people that I’d scoffed at so much that I wasn’t thinking straight.

Shirley told me that her new flat has a phone jack in the toilet. We were trying to if that was more dodgy than heroin users. I think it was a tie.

Anyways, once we had that done, we went to Saint Lukes for lunch, and to buy jewellary. Ever really really get cravings for Chinese food? And then you eat it, and it’s so repulisive it puts the cravings to rest for a couple of weeks? Well, it was one of those days. The best Chinese I’ve ever eaten was from the shop near Charly’s house, in Papanui, chch. But I think I will have to keep on searching. It’s become like my life’s mission to find a place serving Chinese that I’d ever go back to.

So yeah, after lunch, we went into Michael Hill, because Shirley has to replace all her jewellary that got stolen when she was burgled, and she has to spend $300 at Michael Hill. Ewww the jewellery was all so hideously generic and mass produced. Give me something from Texan Art Schools or even Glitz any day over that. Even Shirley, different as our tastes are, didn’t like the stuff in Michael Hill, so I busied myself pointing out engagement rings she could buy me. No, we’re not getting married – but hey! Of course, my taste tended to run to the most expensive items in the store. If any of you viewers at home have a craving to buy me rings, I like single set diamonds, as large as possible and as simple as possible. Either that or diamond/ruby or diamond/emerald combinations. Actually, I have a diamond/ameythst/pearl choker from my grandmother, so maybe you could buy me a diamond and ameythst ring, even though ameythsts aren’t as valuable as emeralds and rubies. Choice, glad we’ve gotten that out of the way.

After that we swung past her place on Mount Eden Road to load up the car, and went out to their new house in Ellerslie (yeah I know they’re nuts for giving up their house and location, but it was only 2 bedrooms and too expensive for Shirley once she goes back to tech and isn’t working full time). So yeah, her new house isn’t half as nice in my opinion, but she apparently likes it better which is cool. I have to admit their bathroom is very stylely – huge and with the tub in the middle of the room. However it’s nuts, cos you have to go through the bathroom to get to the back door. The toilet is has a phone jack in it, like I have already mentioned, but thought I’d reinforce, and carpet. So yeah, that’s perculiar. That word is spelt so wrong, but oh well.

Shirley dropped me off home and I geeked for a weeny bit, before taking a great big long nap. Ahhhhhhh bliss. It’s going to be a quiet night in tonight, like every night. I had a dream while napping that I discovered some bottles of red wine I’d been hoarding and I was both really happy and also pissed off I hadn’t drunk them earlier. But it was just a dream.

Isn’t it funny when ALL of your friends give you like nearly identical advice, and you know that it’s the right thing to do and everything except there’s absolutely no way in hell you’re going to do it because that would make too much sense but also because you’ve had like really really nasty experiances doing the same thing before?