Saturday, January 26, 2008

The trials of coffee addiction

Tour day 1 was great. To Lora's joy, there was no snake at all. As you will see, it is WAY to cold for snake. We also realized that we didn't have a morning Mocha, so it was time to remedy that. After getting up and getting ready, I headed down to try to order to Cafe Mocha's. It doesn't appear the Chinese are heavy into coffee. It was about 7:30 in the morning, and after a brief exchange of uncomfortable short phrases, the young lady (who actually new English pretty well) explained that the machine wouldn't be ready for 15 more minutes as it needed to heat up. Strike One.

After Lora was ready, we headed back down (more than 15 minutes for her to get ready!) and tried again. The lady asked us where we would sit? Apparently mocha's here are not like ones in America where it takes them 25 seconds to shoot it into a paper cup and charge you 5 bucks. I carefully explained we wanted to take it 50 feet to our right to the buffet and have it with breakfast. Apparently the coffee place was different than the buffet place, so it caused a bit of a commotion. She made up the mocha's in decorative ceramic coffee cups, and then didn't let us touch them until she had escorted us to the table next to the coffee shop and got us settled. People at the hotels and such are EXTREMELY polite. Oh well, it was a bit bumpy, but we got coffee!

Breakfast at the buffet was excellent. Where else can you have fried rice, fried noodles, bacon, ham, fresh fruit, pastries, bagels, donuts, congee, waffles, pancakes, and a bunch of things you don't quite recognize all in the same meal. I did give ordering an omelet another try. The previous day I ended up with just 2 fried eggs. This time I got a fresh omelet, but there was some confusion on what I wanted in it so it was built with all the ingredients they had. It was still good. Good thing I like pretty much everything in an omlet. Tomorrow I am determined to find soy sauce. How can there be no soy sauce in China?

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