I'll be continuing in the same vein for a few paragraphs. If this post already bores you, please skip to something else more interesting.
Anyway... a friend I met here (who actually turns out to have been a neighbor of mine in college) told me about a great thrift shop in Falls Church called Unique. I went and found it to be, indeed, a great thrift shop. Penny has that many more cute outfits to prove it.
But more than the thrift shop, I was absolutely thrilled with the shopping center. Before you enter the thrift shop, you leave America for a couple minutes and walk through a mercado you might find in Mexico or China. There were stalls of boots, bras, jewelry, chips and soda, sparkly costumes, and practically everything else under the sun. So cool!
The jackpot of that shopping center, though, was the Chinese grocery store across the parking lot! Someone asked me the name of it, and I honestly couldn't remember. That's because the name in Chinese is Da Zhong Hua Chaoji Shichang, which means (basically) Big China Supermarket. In English, it's called The Great Wall. It's rare that the Chinese characters mean the same thing as the English name of a store. But that's another story.
Anyway, the first time I went there, I was so excited to find it smelling like durian, bustling with black-haired customers, and offering live fish for sale. I rushed to the refrigerator aisle to find the Zongzi. I could eat zongzi forever!
After we'd eaten all the zongzi (2 days later) I therefore needed to go back. This week, I loaded up my cart, and we've been eating nothing but good, homemade Chinese food for the last week or so. We had friends over and cooked a real, authentic, 4-dish Chinese meal. We had jiaozi for lunch and egg-drop soup for dinner. I still need to find a good sauce for our Chinese broccoli, and I was delighted to finally try cooking with garlic stems (amazing! very similar to green onions but don't turn to limp goo when stir-fried). I'm so excited to have found this place! I'll definitely be going back regularly the whole time we're living here in Arlington!
On a similar note: I have no idea what we might put in a consumables shipment when we go to China. I'm just so excited to be able to go buy real Chinese food, I can't even imagine much American food that I COULDN'T go without for a couple years.
2 comments:
What a great place! Reminds me of when I lived in the Japanese section of LA, CA, especially the little Japanese market just down the street, yum!
I'm excited for you! I admit to loving Smiths. I only go somewhere else (Albersons) for chocolate peanut butter ice cream. Good thing there are people like you to keep those entrepreneurs employed!
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