M and I were in a restaurant that should remain nameless, despite its rather sweet name. We were tired of going to Central and wandering about in the bubble, going to fancy foreigner friendly restaurants and paying enhanced prices for mediocre food. We decided to go to a local restaurant, in fact M had found one near the hotel earlier that day.
We stood in front of the restaurant for a while, staring at the menu with its mostly Chinese food, but a few Western specials like hamburger, and sandwiches. There is a dream of finding a great local restaurant. Two other foreigners were behind us also, debating going in, and appeared to decide not to as we went in.
I noticed a flicker of faces as we sat down (or perhaps that is the tourist sense of being stared at) but the attention was brief, and the faces went down back to their meals, mostly older couples, eating a familiar meal, one man alone eating from a bowl and reading a paper.
The waitress, a young girl, perhaps a daughter of the house, brought us a menu and tea and then returned to wait in her corner. The restaurant was quiet. The other foreign couple came in and sat behind us.
We picked through the menu and settled on a combination to make us both happy (I recall we avoided dishes with pineapple) and I looked over at the waitress and a flicker of darkness ran straight towards her, perhaps jumping over or between or around her legs and vanishing behind a sideboard or perhaps into a hole.
For a moment she was frozen and then she ran (later M said, "lifting each foot up into the air as if trying not to touch the ground") into the kitchen at the back, screaming and screaming and crying and for a long time we heard her loud sobs and cries and complaints and though I can understand no Cantonese I could hear her cursing her fate and rats and why had it happened again? and she couldn't take it any more.
After a little while the sound became inaudible, perhaps she became quieter or perhaps she moved further into the back parts of the restaurant. A few people looked up from their plates to peer back into the kitchen. M and I stared at each other. The single man, who was sitting in front of the sideboard where the rat had gone, looked around from his paper to see whether there was anything particularly horrible to notice.
After a little conversation M and I decided that we could just walk out as we had not ordered anything. The foreign couple behind us stayed, having not had quite such a clear vantage point.
