Mei banfa!

And yet more annals of bad service in China......

Not that one really expects 'service' in small Chinese restaurants.....

Well, I happened to be out with an old friend on Friday and we ended up staying up all night at the Pool Bar, eventually stumbling out into a blissful amber dawn at around 6am. I suggested catching a quick bite of breakfast before parting - so we looked in at the first hole-in-the-wall we could find that was open early for the breakfast crowd.

We had a simple Chinese breakfast: baozi (fat, doughy dumplings) and you tiao (fried dough twists) and dou jiang (warm, sweetened soya milk). Now, I'm not such a big fan of this last item to drink on its own (fairly bland tasting, and it has an unpleasant, slightly gritty mouth-feel), but it does make a decent dipping sauce for your doughnuts. We certainly didn't need a large, steaming bowl of it each, but..... oh well, we weren't clear enough in ordering, and it's only going to cost pennies.....

The problem was: it gave off the pungent, unmistakable aroma of ashtrays. We knew before we'd even taken a first tentative sip that the stuff was going to be undrinkable, absolutely foul. We didn't even want to leave the bowls on our table, since the smell was putting us off the rest of the food.

We tried to query this oddity with the staff (my friend has really good Chinese skills), to point out that this did not smell healthy, to ask how on earth this could have happened. We didn't get very far. They brought grandad out of a back room to deal with 'customer relations'. He grudgingly agreed that there was a strange smell, but beamed his unconcern about the problem, and mumbled what is - sadly - a very standard Chinese response when confronted with complaints like this (a phrase which most foreigners find contains absolutely nothing of reassurance or apology, only a dumb impotence - and thus tends to be inflammatory rather than soothing): mei banfa, there's nothing to be done. Aaagh!

Well, at least the baozi and the you tiao were OK. And it did only cost us pennies.