"You gotta love this city
For its body and not its brain."
- The Whitlams, Love This City, 2000
Sin City, Day 2.5;
25 degrees C, humidity 96%
6pm, and the asphalt sweats out a day’s accumulated odours as the dark rises. Cars belch and beep and vie for the next open space. People cluster around the brightly lit doorways of Chinese noodle shops, surging forward at a change of lights. Proprietors shout abuse from the doorways of the Asian grocery stores, gesticulating over the piles of green vegetables, and their customers shout back. Red roast ducks swing glistening from stainless steel hooks. Groups of university girls giggle as chisel-faced businessmen and women stride past.
It’s a short walk from the beehive back to the apartment where I have been ensconced by Auntie, but as the direct route is through Chinatown it’s by no means dull. I may have moved back to a little city, but a visit to the Big City still provides some culture shock (Melbourne doesn’t count, it’s ‘home’). The sounds, sights, the indescribable smells – on the Great Southern Continent, Sin City is in a class of its own. So much to look at! So many other pedestrians to bump into! So much traffic bearing down on one’s blithely jaywalking form! Yikes, I have got to stop gawking or I will be hit by that apocryphal bus (or maybe what the locals call, ‘light-rail’ – they look like trams to me).
Last night in the search for new culinary pleasures, I decided to aim for some Japanese and began looking. Proper Japanese food is a bit hard to find in Sin City’s China town; most proprietors purveying the stuff are actually Korean and as the two cuisines are so very different a Korean-Japanese experience can be disconcerting at best, plain horrible at worst. Imagine a German trying to make genuine Italian food… not so nice, is it. (Ok, you can stop now.)
Anyway, suddenly there was a teppanyaki sign, and the menu tacked on the door seemed genuine enough (no subtle giveaways like dishes written in Korean, for example). So I went in – and down. The restaurant was in a kind of basement. Right at the doorway was a table populated by three quite shady-looking characters speaking loudly in Chinese… and no-one else. Seating for roughly 60 customers, a bit shabby but clean, and EMPTY.
I was about to slink unobtrusively back up the stairs when the waitress spotted me and came rushing over, seating me at my very own teppanyaki grill (set for about 12) before I could protest. I lost all courage to slink and instead spinelessly ordered.
It turned out to be surprisingly good – not fancy, much like the sort of thing you would get at a little back alley place in Japan – but genuine flavours. I sat there with the restaurant to myself (apart from the maybe-Triads) and tucked in.
Who expects a small world experience in such a manic place? As I was finishing up, a couple descended the stairs and were pounced on by the waitress, who led them to another part of my table and sat them down. We made polite conversation about teppanyaki and Japanese food, and it turned out that like me they were not locals. Indeed, they came from north western NSW.
Oh, where from? I replied. I worked up there for a while.
Gunnedah, said the bloke as though I wouldn’t have heard of the place.
Oh, Gunnedah! Who do I know at Gunnedah you could say hello to for me, I said, racking my brains. I thought of the mayor’s name (nice lady, we got along quite well). Say hello to Gai Swain for me, I said. Tell her Andrea said hello.
Andrea? cried the bloke. Breakfast! I listened to you every morning for years!
What were the chances – a brief 10-minute overlap in an unfashionable restaurant below the teeming Chinatown streets? The three of us had a laugh about that. We caught up on that sort of inconsequential sort of stuff that makes conversation go round (Lake Keepit down to 3%, gas pipeline still not completed, hoo-hah over the coal mining experiments on the Liverpool Plains). So to Leith and Annette, hello – it was good to meet you, and thank you for showing yet again that the world is a small place, in the best way.
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