Jan. 7th, 2006
I love Chinatown. I had lunch in Diho Plaza today. "Diho" is 頂好; I wonder why it's transcribed the way it is, instead of "Dinghao." (I had trouble looking up the first character, first because I was expecting it to be "di," and second because my Chinese-English dictionary is from Beijing, so it has simplified characters, and I should probably be looking up traditional characters instead, Houston not being located in the People's Republic. :-/ )
So I had pho and Vietnamese coffee at this fairly busy place. I feel dumb for forgetting the name, but it's a freestanding building; the subtitle is "Vietnamese Fast Food." Fast in the sense that it's you get your food sooner than at most restaurants; it doesn't have a drive-thru or anything.
Vietnamese coffee shouldn't be good, but it is. It's ridiculously strong coffee mixed with condensed milk. Either ingredient would be disgusting by itself, but somehow the way-too-bitter and the way-too-sweet perfectly balance each other. It's puzzlingly delicious.
I took a quick trip to the supermarket in the same plaza. There was a sizeable minority of white people buying Pocky and the like. One guy said, "I wish I liked sake," which struck me as odd. I wanted to comfort him. It's OK. You don't have to like sake. Aw, hush, nobody thinks you're mainstream.
Then I went to the barber's, the used book store, the grocery store, and then home! Interesting, huh? Yeah, this entry was kind of random. Gee, it's like I've had too much caffeine or something.
So I had pho and Vietnamese coffee at this fairly busy place. I feel dumb for forgetting the name, but it's a freestanding building; the subtitle is "Vietnamese Fast Food." Fast in the sense that it's you get your food sooner than at most restaurants; it doesn't have a drive-thru or anything.
Vietnamese coffee shouldn't be good, but it is. It's ridiculously strong coffee mixed with condensed milk. Either ingredient would be disgusting by itself, but somehow the way-too-bitter and the way-too-sweet perfectly balance each other. It's puzzlingly delicious.
I took a quick trip to the supermarket in the same plaza. There was a sizeable minority of white people buying Pocky and the like. One guy said, "I wish I liked sake," which struck me as odd. I wanted to comfort him. It's OK. You don't have to like sake. Aw, hush, nobody thinks you're mainstream.
Then I went to the barber's, the used book store, the grocery store, and then home! Interesting, huh? Yeah, this entry was kind of random. Gee, it's like I've had too much caffeine or something.