Thursday, November 23, 2006

Sittin' On the Dock of the Sushi Bar

You know you've been going to a restaurant long enough to be considered 'family' when the waitresses try to steal your sketch book to get a peek inside.

There's a wonderful little Japanese restaurant opposite the hospital where I have lunch once a week. The ambience is wonderful; I did and still do a lot of my sketching there because it always inspires me to do something artistic over lunch. I've been going there for over a year or more now; the staff there know me so well they feed me -extra- food sometimes. Considering their portions are already huge, this often provides me with dinner from the leftovers.

The sushi chefs and the waitresses there have always found it amusing to watch me plug away at the sketch book while waiting for food to be served. But since the sushi chefs are often kind of shy about being sketched, I have to be sneaky about it. The waitresses just find it the biggest joke ever. Today two of them caught me at it, and demanded to see what I was drawing --me being shy, I declined. One of them tried to distract me, and the other tried to steal the sketch pad off my place, and we had a splendid friendly sibling-like scuffle (which bemused a lot of the patrons.)

But I -did- manage to steal a really crooked sketch of the chap preparing a Japanese salad. It was difficult, because every few seconds I had to sort of look somewhere else and pretend I wasn't drawing at all, since he kept turning around. And every time I looked back up someone had moved something on the counter so I couldn't get a good sketch of anything, even the pots! Still...I tried.



On a different note, I'd have to say that even if I'm not famous (except maybe for a phenomenal bad temper), my life is definitely not -dull-. Tonight it rained and I tried to hail a cab to take me around the corner to my apartment, since I didn't want to get thoroughly drenched with water and rival an ark. Normally, the cab fare would run to about 3RM since base fare starts at 2RM. Mr. Taxi Driver Sir wanted to charge me TEN. TEN! For that amount, just to put things in perspective, I could get to the monorail station 15-20 minutes away!

Fortunately it was raining hard enough or else the people at the bus stop nearby would have heard 'Ah moi(standard term for 'girl' here), go there need 10RM ahhh...' and 'WHAT??? DROP DEAD!' *door slam as Ah Moi with umbrella stalks off*.

Not -all- Ah Moi's loaded with umbrellas, bulky bags and who look a little like stout, short barrels melt in the rain. This Ah Moi regularly walks the 45 minutes back home when the bus doesn't come, thank you very much.

I really wasn't very accomodating to that poor man, come to think of it.

Anyway, that being said, Happy Thanksgiving to everyone who celebrates it! Here in my culture we don't, so I don't have any turkey pictures to put up but err....will a sushi chef chopping salad do?

3 comments:

Laura said...

Sure, it'll do. You should've drawn a picture of the cab or its driver - there's a real turkey! ;)

Shuku said...

Bwahahah! You're right, I should have! Except it was too dark to see him very well and it was still raining...

But yeah. TURKEY. (Not even a Tofurkey.)

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