Dizzy
Back from The Ali Baba’s
I was looking for some apple pies yesterday evening but my efforts turned out to be disappointment. Una told me that fairly good apple pies could be found in The Ali Baba’s in her comment on my last blog entry. I had planned to go and try someday in the future. Nevertheless, by the time we finished reading the linguistic literature I had nursed the idea of trying The Ali Baba’s. Plus it was just nearly 8:00pm, not very late nor very cold.
Earlier comments on The Ali Baba’s go from good to bad, according to www.dianping.com. But the common statement is that it’s too hard for you to find unless you have someone else guide you there. So it is! It took me 20 minutes to find out where it was before I got the answer from the mouth of a vendor nearby. -_-|||
No obvious signs, no trippy neons, no elegant gates. I didn’t believe it was The Ali Baba’s until I pushed the old paintless gate. It was quite noisy. Foreigners inside seemed far more than Chinese customers. They looked at me as though I had been an alien entering a bar for humans. I took a seat in a corner–I didn’t like that corner but actually it was one of the last few seats to choose from. The light was not that dim as that in real bars–I mean, The Ali Baba’s was just a little restaurant, not actually a bar or a club.
I’d had dinner before so I ordered only some fruit salad, a tin of Sprite, and an apple pie served with icecream. Soon they were ordinarily served, like in other western restaurants somewhere else. I shoud say, the taste was ordinary, too. You can never expect too much. But the atmosphere there was fabulous. The most impressive thing was the enormous amount of graffiti on the wall, in different languages and colors. It was no easy task to find a blank and doodle on my own.
The total cost was 30RMB. I don’t think it too expensive or too cheap. Generally speaking it’s a good place to see if you wanna pick up some English or make new friends there.
I didn’t bring my digital camera so there’s no original picture for this entry. But the apple pie I had was much like the one in the picture below. They’re not exactly the same.