BANISHMENT 19: Exotic Food

This weekend my dear friend and I decided to try something new. This was a very large, Fourth of July Fireworks caliber decision because we are old souls who like routine. We are regulars. We drink coffee with two creams and will yell profanity at you if you add three. We have our sides of the bed, our staple authors, and our favorite ways to act passive aggressive. To change these things up would be to find a limb and climb on it. And we are very much fans of tree trunks.

But routines, despite their dependability, aren't always good. They kill things like neurons and relationships. So we decided, against our best instincts, that we ought to break out of our homey hole and mix things up. Hence, our expedition to Suzy Wong's House of Yum.

I was very skeptical about the House of Yum. It sounded like a brothel, not a restaurant. And trying to consume anything at the potential grooming grounds of prostitutes is a little unsettling. You have to wonder where the plates have been and if you order a Bowl of O La La, what are you really going to get? But despite the little voices in my head saying 'You will not make friends with foreign objects,' I took the plunge and ordered a peculiar drink concoction featuring ginger and pineapple in addition to the the so-called famous bowl of yum.

I have always wanted to be the kind of person who eats exotic, ethnic food on a daily basis. Those people are so high on the cool chain. They can use words like gyoza, tempura, and shu mai and not be trying to imitate the Avatar language. They can order entire meals that look like art projects and use chopsticks in more productive ways than as tools to poke your dinner guest underneath the table.

But I am not a cool ethnic food eater. I am not good with spices. They leave my stomach in a very irritated state and it lashes out like Nancy Grace on late night television. While my yum bowl bore no evidence of a discreet downtown prostitute ring, and while it entirely lived up to its Yum surname, by the end of the night I was doubled over, sharing the yummy goodness with another kind of porcelain bowl than the meal had started out in. May God rest the little fishies.