Dear Spongebob, I ate Squidward. Sorry.

Well, yesterday was a tough day. I had to drive quite a ways to get Olive to her hearing aid doctor. The office was in one of those shopping centers with the crappy Mexican restaurant, the Chinese acupuncture clinic, the barber shop with the spinning pole, and the dreary looking Jewish banquet hall. Olive lives in a rather wealthy neighborhood with big houses and fences and alarm systems. The office was in a neighborhood with very small, old houses with taped windows and surly looking people. Scary. The doctor had a dozen degrees and awards up on the wall, but when he came into the waiting room to get Olive, I shrank away. He looks fairly normal and I'm sure he's a very nice man, but one of those people you just get a creepy feeling from and you watch his every move with wary distrust. He adjusts her hearing aid and tells her she needs to wear it every day so that her brain gets used to hearing again. When we leave the office, I call our friend Margo to let her know we were heading to the restaurant to meet her for lunch. Olive, while I was on the phone, kept saying, you're shouting you're shouting. Finally, once I hung up, I asked her what she meant. "You guys are shouting at me. It sounds like you are shouting." I remind her that I was talking in a normal tone of voice, but it sounded like I was shouting because she wasn't used to hearing anything. She was furious and insisted that me and the doctor were lying to her and shouting. I told her, again, that I have shouted at her for months now and with the hearing aid was the first time I haven't had to. So we get in the car to head to the Chinese restaurant in Van Nuys (which looks like it's pronounced Van New-eeees but is apparently pronounced Van Eyes). The entire way Olive is fuming because it's all so loud and apparently we were doing it to annoy her. I finally make it to the restaurant safely (woo hoo) and lead Olive inside where Margo is waiting. The restaurant isn't some Americanized Chinese restaurant. It's as close to Hong Kong style food as you can get without being IN Hong Kong. Everyone in there is Chinese, speaking Chinese, and eating with chopsticks. There are whole ducks hanging in the roaster and entire chickens sitting under heat lamps. Not to mention the chicken legs and intestines and stomachs sitting in broth. Gag. We just let Margo order whatever and when it came, I ate it with chopsticks to be as authentic as possible. The fried rice had roast duck in it and though it was a little salty, it is the best freaking fried rice I have had since Food Fest at BYU-Hawaii! There was also a platter of "crispy noodles" topped with gravy and roast pig, chicken, and pieces of squid. Yes, that's right. Squid. I ate a big bite of the white squid meat (which wasn't as bad as I was expecting, but certainly not good. Kind of like Vegemite). Then I decided to be daring and eat a tentacle, complete with the little suction cup things. Ladies and gentlemen I'm here to tell you that was one of the most disgusting things I've ever done. The taste was salty and fishy, but the worst part was the texture. It was like eating a finger, rubbery on the outside and something crunchy and hard on the inside. I didn't finish eating the rest of the tentacles. The third platter was some kind of stir fry in soy sauce with rice noodles and BBQ beef. It was all pretty good, except the crispy noodle dish. Olive started the meal furious and snapped at us not to discuss her hearing doctor visit. She was so angry me and Margo were silent for a while, until Olive said something about the restaurant being nice. I thought it was rather funny that she was telling Margo how nice it was when during the ride she kept saying, "Where is Margo taking us?" and was afraid that a "real Chinese restaurant" was going to serve nothing but raw fish. After dinner she asked if we were going to get a fortune cookie. A word to the Americans: fortune cookies are not Chinese. After lunch we walked next door to the Asian supermarket where I bought some Chinese cookies and crackers for the family. The store was like being in China. The music was Chinese, the announcements were in Chinese, many items only had Chinese labels, and most of the patrons were Asian. (I was surprised at the amount of caucasians there, however.) The meat department had tons of dead fish on ice and tons of live crabs, shrimp, oysters, clams, and lobsters. Ewwww. Olive opened a package of cookies to eat while we walked around and we ate some. Really good actually. Margo kept pulling things out that was popular to Chinese people and I kept making faces. I mean, shrimp flavored crackers? I think I want to hurl. And cookies with green onion and sesame seeds? But at least it was an adventure! Olive was slightly panicky about me finding my way home, but despite the terrible traffic, we made it home just fine. The rest of the day sucked massively, but I'm certainly finding out how much crap I can deal with, aren't I? People keep telling me it means something good is going to happen, and I think, 'Can I pick my prize? Like you do at the dentist's office?' But in a little over a week I'll be out of here! Woot woot!