Miracle Meals

Lila went to Hong Kong today. I stayed home and spent several hours dealing with Blogger, Feedburner, and Facebook. My "automatic publishing" set-up isn't working; the problem seems to lie partially with Blogger, and partially with Feedburner.

In the evening I went out to meet her. We shopped at Holiday Plaza for food for a little "summer solstice" do we're having tomorrow, then went and tried a new vegetarian restaurant in Overseas Chinese Town ("OCT"), not far from our house.

My friend Thomas Bird heard me mention the other day that I'm a vegetarian. Turns out he became a veg at age 9, when his mom told him where beef came from. He had just reviewed this new restaurant for That's PRD Magazine, and suggested we give it a try.

And we did. And it was great. If you live in Shenzhen, you probably know the "Bar Street" on the so-called "Ecology Square" in OCT ("Bar" and "Ecology" together always cracks me up). If you don't know that, but you know the OCT Walmart, start at the Walmart and walk north (away from Shennan) through the C-Mall; you'll come out at Ecology Square on the north end. The restaurant is on the left side of the Square, and toward the back (north). Look for signage on the front similar to this business card:

Print this for the taxi
Note the URL is wrong (no "l" after "meals")

Excellent food, cool atmosphere, a nice home page, real dedication to veg lifestyle, and even some English. "Luna" speaks some, and the website has an English version. (Note that the URL address as given on the business card is wrong; it's http://www.miraclemeals.com.cn/ with no "l" after "miraclemeals"). The menu also has English, though sometimes you'll have to guess what the dish is (what exactly are the "eight treasures" anyway?)

Of course, right waway my thoughts turned to the possibilities. It would be a great place for a weekly Buddhist discussion group, maybe on Mondays to support those trying "Meatless/Mooless Monday." But for now, we'll just eat there.

Here's a slightly revised map from the back of the card:

As an added bonus, our dear friend (and best man at my wedding) Alan is back in town, and staying near the restaurant, so he ambled on over and joined us. It feels like "home" when we see him. The talk turned to one of my favorite places in the world, the American Southwest, and he even specifically mentioned Acoma "Sky City" in New Mexico, which I had written a little about in the first post on my "America" blog.

A nice ending to the day.

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The Saturday morning posts:

• 365 Secrets of Happiness: Slap Someone's Hand (setting boundaries)
• Meet Joe Campbell: Idea #6: Archetypes (how Campbell uses standard figures to understand myths and other stories)