Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Interior decorator wanted

Tonight we met up with another colleague of ours in town and decided to
hit Jian Tao, a Chinese restaurant on Bole Road. The restaurant has a
courtyard with is surrounded by a wall with a gate for cars to pull in,
and when our driver turned into the lot, the inside of the car was
flooded in blue light. There were strings of blue lights, like large
Christmas lights, draped over the courtyard and two large red paper
lanterns hanging among them. When we walked into the restaurant, we
grabbed a small table for four and looked over the menus we were handed.
We ordered "sweat and sour" pork (seriously), egg drop soup, "eggplant
iron plate", vegetable fried rice and spicy ground beef and tofu, all of
which tasted excellent. Our table was barely large enough to handle all
the plates, but we made due. The purple table cloth matched the cloth
napkins, although the table cloth was stained and the napkins had
cigarette burns in them. I glanced around at the restaurant interior. As
one would expect from the courtyard, the inside of the place was
equally, as one of my coworkers described it, "loud". There were the
typical decorations, such as red and gold, diamond-shaped posters with
the character for "luck" hung upside-down (on purpose) and a miniature
Chinese flag together with a flag for the Beijing Olympics. There was
also a television in the middle of the room playing a Chinese news
channel and the restaurant owner plunked herself down at a table in
front of it to watch as she balanced the books. However, the feature
that threw off my senses completely were the large, three-dimensional
snowflakes stuck to the walls. Considering we were in Africa, this
seemed akin to a restaurant in Canada decorating its walls with pictures
of camels and cacti.

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