Dim Sum and Yam Cha

I woke up this morning and heading to common kitchen for some of my usual breakfast fare- crunchy cereal, soy milk, half a banana and toast with hummus. Then Bill reminds me that this morning there was to be an O-Week trip to a Chinese Restarant for some sort of chinese food. Something called Dim Sum. "Ah, Dim Sum is greasy chinese food...". I had read about this Dim Sum thing in my Peoples and Cultures course at Northeastern but I didn't really remember what I had read...

Dim Sum or Yam Cha is the equivalent to Spanish Tapas that you eat at tea time, whatever time that may be. Usually around brunch time I suppose. We get there and it was like a buffet on wheels. There was a waitstaff wheeling this little dessert carts around the restaurant with all sort of tasty looking things which weren't vegetarian of course. We sit down at our table and while we are waiting for the rest of our party of 20 or so to arrive we just watch the various servers pause and zoom by our table with dim sum asking us if we wanted any "insert unpronouncable name here".

When the rest of our party arrived, the eating fest began. Small dish after small dish was set before us, each with about 3 dim sums on each plate. And all very fried. There was chicken feet, stuffed oysters, vegetable rolls, deep-fried toast, stuffed prawns, puffy sesame seed globe-shaped bread, dumplings, egg custard pastry, fried maki rolls...and the list goes on. All this is at like 11:45 in the morning. The most interesting Dim Sum I had was the sweet bean curd, which was basically a bowl of sweet syrupy stuff with lumps of really soft tofu. The syrup was tasty. Lumpy tofu, not so much.

I actually had authentic chinese food! It exists! Dim Sum rules!