{"id":87614067,"date":"2006-06-20T21:56:17","date_gmt":"2006-06-21T05:56:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.geckotemple.com\/blog\/?p=87614067"},"modified":"2006-06-20T21:56:17","modified_gmt":"2006-06-21T05:56:17","slug":"vacay06-day-18-worst-chinese-food-evaaar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.geckotemple.com\/blog\/?p=87614067","title":{"rendered":"Vacay06 Day 1.8: Worst Chinese Food, EVAAAR…"},"content":{"rendered":"

So, on the first night of our adventure, we stayed in Kent, at the quiet and reasonably-priced Best Western “On the Green,” which means every room (that’s not overlooking the parking lot) is overlooking the uh… golfers. Actually, it was mostly overlooking the ducks, and the occasional golfcart. I had visions of Rip and I sneaking out in the middle of the night and recreating scenes from CaddyShack, but then decided against it due to my hurt back (managed to mangle something in my lowerback during a particularly rousing round of “Laundry Bucket Street: Overload Extreme 360,” which Arwen tends to perform using a stroller, but I like to do bareback<\/em>, ’cause that’s how I roll).<\/p>\n

So anyhoo, we get everything into the room, and since we’re all starvin’ like Marvin, we decide to wander into the wild streets of Kent’s golfing district, and see what there is to eat.<\/p>\n

Ripley saw the chinese food place next door, which I won’t name, lest Google unleash its daemons on the place, and start associating it with terms like “suck” and “gross” and “unintentionally comedic,” but here’s a picture.<\/p>\n

\"CIMG0006\"<\/a> (Note the single vehicle parked out front – should’ve been our first hint).<\/p>\n

We walk in, and were seated as far away as possible from the only other occupied table, probably a bad sign, and we should’ve kept going to… oh, anywhere. The sports bar next door sounded pretty good after this place, I’m serious.<\/p>\n

So we order a combo plate thing, at $12\/person, ’cause it’s got Beef & Brocolli, which is my personal fave, and sweet & sour pork, which is Rip’s fave. I don’t know if there was anything Arwen wanted in there or not. We were all in for a real… buncha plates of food…<\/p>\n

First comes the wonton soup, which was very very MSG-y, and contained ONE! ENTIRE! WONTON! per bowl. Okay, so maybe that’s not their forte, or something. It’ll get better, we keep telling ourselves. Rip liked it (salt AND sugar? where do I sign up?). Next arrived the sweet and sour shrimp<\/em>, which was from the EAST combo, not the SOUTH combo that we ordered, so we sent that back. Not a problem, just a little mixup. While that’s being fixed, a plate of deep fried and heavily glazed something (I think I was supposed to be ginger chicken, but who knows, really?) arrived, along with a plate of sauces…<\/p>\n

\"CIMG0001\"<\/a>So what do we have here? There’s the plate of ginger something at the top left there, and then the sweet & sour sauce, which came with the spring rolls (to be fair, those were edible, if very greasy), but that little trifecta plate there on the right? Know what was in that?<\/p>\n

Sesame seeds. Ketchup. And of course, that cornerstone of Asian Cousine: Dijon freakin’ Mustard.<\/p>\n

These things arrived with the warning that they were very very hot, and when I said “Hot – spicy?” the guy went into this elaborate hand-gestured thing about how it was so<\/em> spicy, that if Ripley were to touch it with his fingertips, it would probably burn the skin.<\/p>\n

So I start thinking “okay… now we’re talking. HOT stuff. Like chillis and stuff. Things that’ll blow the top of my head clean off…”<\/p>\n

No, he meant heat-hot, not spice hot.<\/p>\n

When I tried the ginger chicken, risking the blazing hoop of doom, Arwen asked me if it was “that spicy,” and I responded “I could probably put this in my eye without it being annoying.”<\/p>\n

The sweet and (not-at-all) sour pork finally arrived, and we ate (some of) that.<\/p>\n

But oh good lord, it was bad.<\/p>\n

We scuttled back to our hotel room, and Arwen and I thought we’d wash down all that salt & sugar with some coffee. How can we go wrong?<\/p>\n

\"CIMG0005\"<\/a><\/p>\n

It tasted fine, dear readers, even if the little grounds & filter thing looked like something that should come with a DustBuster (I fully expected to see the words “HEPA Filter” on the bag somewhere).<\/p>\n

It was good though, (Note to self: Next time I find some, I gotta buy & try some Coke Black, which is Coke with Coffee in it – no, seriously).<\/p>\n

So we drank that, and watched Ice Age II, during which I had a shower that had enough water pressure to blow my eyebrows off.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So, on the first night of our adventure, we stayed in Kent, at the quiet and reasonably-priced Best Western “On the Green,” which means every room (that’s not overlooking the parking lot) is overlooking the uh… golfers. Actually, it was mostly overlooking the ducks, and the occasional golfcart. I had visions of Rip and I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-87614067","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-friends","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.geckotemple.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87614067","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.geckotemple.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.geckotemple.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.geckotemple.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.geckotemple.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=87614067"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.geckotemple.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87614067\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.geckotemple.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=87614067"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.geckotemple.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=87614067"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.geckotemple.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=87614067"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}