Decay got the call yesterday - our wedding bands were ready and waiting to see if they fit. What's this got to do with dinner? Um... massive amounts of indecisiveness from the entity known as Droidy, and a hankering for Chinese food of a better quality than that found in your generic foodcourt from the entity known as Decay.

After the aforementioned indecisiveness and Chinese food desirement, we ended up at a local favourite, 'Copper Chimney', which we've been to a whole bunch of times before with my parentals.

We walked in, and were ushered to a table ... after being seated, Decay was asked "Will you be ok with chopsticks?" ... Someone wasn't very impressed with that ... we requested Oolong Tea for drinks, except that the waiter didn't understand until I said it, even though I thought Decay was quite understandable... and the waiter was looking at Decay, and not me... so I'm slightly bemused, Decay's mildly annoyed, and we're generally all a bit losted. We're handed the Aussie Chinese menu, which takes a bit of deciphering from me to figure out what the dishes might be in Chinese ... not that having been handed a Chinese menu would've helped since I can't read it anyways...

Vincent (the manager dude who I think recognised us) came to take our order, of San Choi Bao otherwise known as "Lettuce Delight", and a hot platter of Sizzling Beef. I think between bringing over the teapot, and serving the main dish, our waiter got a talking-to from Vincent... but I'll get to that soon ... Decay and I sat around, munching on Prawn crackers and sugared peanuts (complimentary), talking about work, uni, wedding, freckles, and chopsticks and forks. Hey, it made sense to us!

Our San Choi Bao arrived after a small wait. Decay wondered how many lettuces they'd have to go through to get so many uniformly-sized lettuce cups to trim to correct size. The filling was full of mince, water chestnuts, and essential mushrooms, so-called by Decay because essentially, you can't remove the things... these things are tasty. And it was about the right sized dish to order so we could finish the food and not have just one main course item, since from experience, we knew we couldn't have two main dishes. We both managed not to make too much of a mess manipulating the lettuce cup to wrap up the contents for consumption ...

A little while after the plateage for the San Choi Bao was cleared, the sizzling platter of beef arrived. We were served some rice from our trusty rice canister, and the waiter began the fencing flourish, which seems like a universal indicator that they're about to dish out the food to us in our bowls. Decay told him not to, but the dude didn't really pay attention until I said not to in Cantonese... Hmmm... Ahh well, what do you do? The sizzling platter arrived with some steamed broccoli on the side... I don't actually remember this dish actually having steamed broccoli involved - maybe it was edible decoration, maybe they were pandering to the 'gwei lo', or maybe I've just got a really bad memory. It was Ok, the meat had been bicarb of soda-ed or whatever to make it all tender, but it was flavoury enough and a heap better than what we would've had if we ended up doing food-court food...

Anyways... the reason why we think someone got a talking-to, was when the dishes were being cleared after we'd finished our sizzling plate of beef, one of the other waitresses walked over to help the main waiter dude, but he sent her away with something I didn't hear at all, and Decay didn't understand. Table cleared, we got a fruit platter, and some sweet soup - both items not on the listed menu. These kinds of things are freebies the Chinese groups will get when they go out for dinner, and it's something I've known of since I was about knee high to something particularly short. The fruit platter had some watermelon, rockmelon, honeydew melon, and orange slices on it. It wasn't super-cold out of the fridge, which was nice for my teeth (; The sweet soup was not red bean soup, for once! Actually, we don't often get red bean soup at this place, so that was semi-expected. Instead, we got a clear sweet soup with white cloud fungus floating about, along with assorted weird nuts and stuff that I associated with having sweet soup, and would have no idea of what they're actually a part of...

Yes. It's weird going to a normal Chinese restaurant and getting the Aussie treatment ... Still, for just about 30.00 we got a decent enough meal, and we got the Chinese freebies. No free tea though - they reserve that kind of treatment for frequent visitors, or people who fix up their boiling water units... *grin* ...