Particular flavours

Because it is compulsory to go to a supermarket anywhere Naomi and I travel to, I got to see the varieties of potato crisps on the shelves. No mere salt 'n' vinegar chippies for the Chinese! Alongside the shelves of knock-offs, there were cucumber flavor potato chips from Lays!

Nor­mally if I had a crav­ing for cucum­bers and potato chips at the same time, I’d have gone and bought cucum­bers and potato chips. But the damn Chi­nese, they think of every­thing, includ­ing com­bined crav­ings for cucum­bers and potato chips.

And while chicken-flavoured snacks are not new, they’ve gone one bet­ter, the Chi­nese. There were ‘crispy drum­stick fla­vor’ potato crisps; For tomato-flavour affi­ciona­dos, there were ‘cherry tomato flavor' potato crisps, and if you fancied BBQ ribs... you get the idea.

No, wait. There was the big daddy of them all - Ital­ian Red Meat Fla­vor. Though what ani­mal the red meat was from wasn’t specified.

We also saw more of Stefanie Sun's photos in the one supermarket than anywhere in Singapore. She's selling all manner of food­stuff in China, and classier ones too (if you con­sider Lays classy) com­pared with what Gong Li (the unin­tel­li­gi­ble woman in Miami Vice) is flogging - some orange flavoured biscuits which look like if you ate them, you have to pamper yourself after with L'Oreal products.

I have a friend who wouldn’t have minded us buy­ing her some Ste­fanie Sun (red meat or white?) flavoured snacks, nor Gong Li scented ones, but that’s another weird story I don’t want to get into now.

But then you’d want to for­give the Chi­nese for all their weird­ness because in Shang­hai, you can get a really decent Ital­ian lunch for under S$15 at this place called Da Marco's, which, after eating, we discovered to be within the building we were staying at, and needn't have had to walk out in the rain bitching in the first place.

Being the gluttons that we were, we over-ordered of course and had to take out half a pizza, half a plate of fusili and a quarter slice of lasagne, then we spent a minute deciphering the Filipina waitress saying 'fapeow mum' repeatedly when we paid for our meals.

Turns out, or at least I'm guessing, she was asking Naomi if she wanted an official receipt.

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