Then Comes The Rain

Even though summer's here in Townsville, the hot season brings with it heavy rain, and if I knew my meteorology a little better, I could perhaps tells you why. Just recently, Brisbane was hit by a storm that did a fair bit of damage and I believe even more storms are expected. It's said to be the worst storm that hit there since the 1970s.

Townsville I think is pretty safe from flooding, but with Mother Nature PMS-ing due to global warming etc etc etc, who knows what'll happen.

On Thursday, two days ago, me, my mom and my brother headed out to an Asian convenience store to load up on food that catered more to our taste. During my White Worshipping, childhood days where I wanted to be like the American kids who could wear whatever they wanted to school and had lockers to put their bags and books in, I would often turn my nose up at rice and its accompanying dishes, often requesting for spaghetti, fried chicken, baked potatoes etc.

Having eaten quite enough food to be able to pronounce a solid judgement on what food I think reigns supreme, unsurprisingly, it's gotta be Asian.

Now this excludes most types of Westernized Asian food, some of them abominations. One I recently had a bad encounter with was Lemon Chicken on a Stick. Not all kinds of Lemon Chicken are horrible - the ones I had in Hawaii for example were pretty tasty. The idea is to have chicken strips/chunks dipped in batter (though I think this is optional), fried, then doused with a sweet and sour lemon sauce.

However, this Lemon Chicken on a Stick was a heinous invention indeed. It's appearance was deceptively appealing, looking like five large durian seed-sized chunks of meat coated in batter, deep fried and skewered neatly on a bamboo stick. The surface of said meat was a dark golden brown and had a glossy, sticky sheen to it which I surmised was the lemon sauce. For AUD$3.50, I bought it because I was famished and my 6-inch Italian Cold Cut sub hadn't quite hit the spot (bigger is sometimes better hmm).

I plopped myself down, tastebuds tingling in anticipation. I didn't have high hopes for it of course and I figured I just wanted some thick juicy meat to bite into, regardless of the taste. I sank my teeth into the first nugget and lo and behold! It was all an ILLUSION!

Nine tenths of it was batter! My teeth had to go through a thick layer of lemon flavored batter before it even found chicken meat. It's like eating those "cucur pisang" (banana... cucurs haha.. um, they're an Asian food that's made from overripe bananas and flour, mashed together in a ball and deep fried), but at least you knew what to expect then!

I reluctantly finished the first one and dissected the second to have a better look. After peeling and probing, I was filled with disgust. The chicken pieces were the size of peas! It's sickening and insulting that food like this can be even called "Chinese". I had to throw the rest away. The strangest part of it all however, is that people still queue up and pay absurd amounts of money (AUD$12 for mixed rice?) for godawful food. WHY!??

Having said all that, my sister recently made a comment about how she wants to try "Chinese" food, as in the kind you can get in little white box, the kind you get from Chinatown in the US with contents going by the name of "Mushu Pork". There is a certain novelty in it I guess. I remember a phase in my childhood where I enjoyed eating rice from a little bowl with chopsticks (instead of with a spoon and fork) because of watching all those Hong Kong TV series. After that, it was the eating-with-hands phase whenever I ate a meal that had curry in it. Eating with a fork I think was encouraged by my grandmother, who told me that Americans do it and it stuck. So what's left to try I guess is eating food out of a cardboard box. I might give it a go one day... Hmm.

So anyway (don't I just love to go off on a tangent), the Asian convenience store is great. I can get cincau there, rose syrup, guilinggao (turtle jelly! mmm) and mom can get her curries, spices, Asian vegetables like white carrot and sauces. Going there assuages my longing for home.

So after that that we went to Stocklands, which is just down the road. Stocklands is a shopping center, but it's nowhere near the size of say One Utama. It's probably more the size of Atria. Mom goes to Woolworths, which is like Cold Storage, and me and my brother go to EB Games, which is like the original version of all the pirated game stalls/shops in KL.

My brother and I go browsing through the shelves of PC games. The older PC games like Ultimate Zoo Tycoon, Sacred, Battle for Middle Earth cost like AUD$20, while the newer games like Mass Effect, the Witcher costs AUD$70 or more. Travis just got himself a spanking new laptop with specs that make my laptop look geriatric. The price to pay of course is that his games cost way more than mine. Consequently, his wallet's barren.

While we look, a siren starts wailing. One of the storeboys looks up and goes, "Is that the evacuation alarm?" Seconds later, an announcer on loudspeaker answers his question. We're to evacuate. My first paranoid thought was, "Someone's got a gun!" A few weeks ago I saw a program on TV that featured the 20 worst acts of violence. Columbine and Virginia Tech were on the list as well as one that popped into my mind then - this guy who goes berserk in a shopping mall.

People started moving out of the stores and I passed this frustrated guy who went, "Can I just get this game first?" Hahaha. I went a bit faster than my brother who reflected the earlier guy's sentiments in that he couldn't make any purchases. Everywhere, shutters were being rolled down as people calmly walked past. That's what's surprising. People were moving fast, but not frantically as to cause chaos.

As I walked out, the cause of the evacuation became apparent. There was a wide ankle-height pool in front of some bank that was unfortunately situated right at the exit. The light rain I had driven through going to Stocklands had become quite a downpour as we were inside the shopping center. Outside, rain was pouring in torrents and about a hundred customers and workers waited outside, presumably for transport or just for the rain to stop.

The tricky part was now finding our mother, and we didn't have cellphones. My brother's more "she'll find us one la, let's just wait by the car", and I'm more certain that she won't until much later. After scanning around on our side and not finding her, we went up the carpark and my brother waited by the car while I headed off in search of mom. I went to the entrance we used when we first got there, saw to my dismay that the lower carpark had become a shallow pool, then saw mom JUST making her exit from the mall, indubitably one of the last ones out.

Unsurprisingly, she told me she was looking for us IN the shopping center, trying to find out where EB games was (which was at the opposite end) and a security guard had to chase her out. That's our mother. A gem of a woman and a heart of gold but has her blonde moments sometimes, even though it's probably maternal instinct kicking in. My brother exasperatedly goes, "MOM, it's an evacuation signal, it means the WHOLE MALL is evacuated! OF COURSE we're not in there!" Mom concedes conclusively, "Yea, I think next time in any emergency we should come back to the car." You gotta love her.

So that was our first shopping center evacuation. Pretty neat. It comes 2nd to the earthquake in Hawaii in terms of real-life disaster moment. As we drove back, we found out the traffic lights in the vicinity had been knocked out, presumably by lightning, and traffic police were already doing their job.

Because no one got anything they needed in Stockland, I had to drive to Castle Town Shopping Center, which is nearer to our place, and resume shopping there. When we were done, that's where and when I had that horrible "Chinese" food.

Ahh, sometimes Townsville CAN be interesting after all.