Four young tourists from Japan arrived, and tasted diligently.
My good friend JD (musician/astrologist) arrives to taste the sea, and offers: "You share the same birthday as Joan of Arc, perhaps there's something in it!" It's sweet of him to be so kind, offering me heroines.
Hu You Xue's neighborhood shop is crowded at 10 PM on a Monday when I arrive to taste.
"Here, try," he said when the food arrived, and I tasted the thinly sliced, salty white lard.
I was suspicious — fish lasagna sounded about as appealing as goat sushi — but when I arrived home and tasted the big chunks of nonsalty cod, homemade tomato and pesto sauce and lots of creamy cheese of some kind, I was a convert.
Then Starbucks arrived, shifting tastes and toppling incumbents.
It meant that, before the hors d'oeuvre had arrived, my taste buds were rushing about in confusion shouting "Enough amusement!".
When I arrived, the tasting room, a sunny space with white-stone walls and spindly cast-iron chandeliers, was full of tourists mispronouncing "claret" and puzzling over even stranger terms like gewürtztraminer and viognier.
It arrived, looking and tasting more like a mountainous side dish of tossed-together frozen vegetables than the entree its price reflected.
When that one arrived, a third person tasted it, and then ordered another for himself.
