The Durian Incident / Mochi, how could you?

I had to wait an hour for dinner tonight, hungry, desperate, faint, while Mike led me from restaurant to expensive restaurant looking for somewhere able to satisfy his exacting standards at wholesale price.  The Princess and the Pea Vine.  We had taken the subway from Pete's place in Pudong, where we're now staying, over to ritzy Lujiazui - the financial center of the universe, and home to massively tall buildings and some dubious architectural decisions - and ended up prowling around The Super Brand Name Mall (that's its name!) for dinner.  Pete and Elyn had taken us there for dinner the other day, but Mike balked at the (admittedly rather expensive) Xiao Long Bao at the restaurant that had been our first choice plan.  We ended up at a Taiwanese place for dinner, not too expensive, not too bad.  Nothing special.  But somewhere during that long hour prior to dinner we had passed a dessert restaurant with pictures of mochi in the window.  I never leave a restaurant and immediately want dessert, but here I was pulling mike over to the mochi place.  Little did we know it wasn't a mochi place so much as a durian dessert place, but they did orders to-go, which was what we wanted.  I settled on the 5-mochi sampler and Mike got something strange that could have been custard, or could have been milk (it was milk) with two scoops in it:  one of thai black rice and one of durian.  The first bite of the mochi sampler was foreboding.  Or downright bad, really.  Kind of rotten, even.  Durian.

Anything that requires both pickles and a cup of Earl Grey Tea to wash the taste away is no good.

Mike and Ann

Ann and I started our day with extensive plans: fabric market, tea and grabbing food along the way.  Unfortunately, we didn't made it out of the house until 7 at night, after Ann got in a 3 hour nap (so tired!).  Thus our search for a good dinner place was under strain before it ever even began.  We arrived in Lujiazui and went to the only place that looked remotely promising, the Super Brand Name Mall (it doesn't sound remotely promising, does it).  There I searched and searched for a place to eat, becoming more worried as stipulations were passed on by Ann.  "No noodles.  No soup.  No Korean.  No sea food."...I took up the challenge.  We walked around the mall for almost an hour and after only 45 minutes I could tell that I was losing Ann.  It started with lagging as we were getting off the escalator.  She wasn't dodging other couples the way she normally can.  A glazed look had come into her eyes.  I made an almost fatal error by settling too soon, steering us towards a place that looked good and then aborting after we were seated.  Ann's eyes flashed with anger.  I fended her off with sweet words and managed to find a good Taiwanese place in the end.  Unfortunately, the Mochi place had already been spotted.  Our fate was sealed.

Durian burps for the rest of the night.  Worst fate in the world.

Ann and Mike