This past weekend, I went to a little furniture market
that’s about two hours away by bus. (It’s only 15 kilometers from Macau.)
I didn’t buy anything but hadn’t expected to, so it’s not
like I was disappointed. And lunch was fabulous.
Eating Chinese-style is a great thing. Essentially, the
menus here are made up of completely separate dishes: meat, veggie, rice,
noodles. Some, like fried rice, has multiple ingredients, but for the most
part, it’s one or two items.
Ordering Chinese-style means that one person orders for
the whole table but everyone gets a dish. When the dishes arrive, they’re all
placed on this lazy Susan and everyone digs into however much stuff they want.
You can sample everything, gorge yourself on one dish or completely turn up
your nose at others. It’s a fantastic way to eat.
Really, the whole lazy Susan thing should be
brought to America.
We’d fight over it, I’m sure, but it’s a much more convenient method of passing
this or that all the way across.
And there’s so much food! When the group went into
whatever restaurant it was, it was a group of six people. We sat down, looked
at the menus and ordered just as I saw two more of the bigger group walk by. I
waved them down and they joined us. Not five minutes later, two more wandered
by and we got them in, too.
Thank God! We’d been stuffing ourselves for several
dishes when I suddenly realized that all that food had been intended to serve
six people, not the 10 we wound up with. It was just so much food.
On Friday, I’d had another big meal out, this time as
part of an outreach program. It was my originally schedule movie night (the one
I show outdoors on a monthly basis) but instead of doing that, I got tapped to
attend the women’s power dinner featuring one of the basketball people.
I don’t know how long this had been in the works, but the
PR people here had been trying to get a basketball clinic going and bring in an
NBA somebody for it. I’ve no idea who the NBA somebody was, but turns out, they
also got a WNBA player. And the WNBA is one of the things I covered back in my
time as a sportswriter.
So when I saw the notes on it, I commented to the PR guy
that I’d covered the league and he immediately invited me to the dinner. I got
to be somewhat of a facilitator, which was a bit unexpected.
Morocco
is not like China
as far as time goes. This dinner was scheduled to start at 6:30. In Morocco, that
means 7:15. In China,
that means 6:05. So I got stuck in a room with women I did not know as my other
two colleagues went to pick up the guest of honor.
I did fairly well, though. Fortunately, they spoke
English, which I hadn’t counted on. We were really having a great discussion
when Taj McWilliams-Franklin arrived, and it continued through the dinner.
Taj (named after Mahal, a fact of which I’d been unaware
until that evening; ditto for her middle name, which, since she didn’t seem to
share often I won’t list) was a great centerpiece to the meeting. Just a
gregarious, honest person who definitely enjoyed what she did.
Until I did the research on her for the intro, I had no
idea she wound up playing for Detroit
after my departure. One of her two league championships was with Detroit, even. Had no
idea.
She was also from Augusta,
Georgia, so we
chatted about that, too, along with grits, chopsticks, germs and all kinds of
other weird topics. It really was a fun evening. (And I get to collect OT for
it, go figure.)
Headed out, she, my two colleagues and I were the last to
leave the restaurant. It was on the sixth floor or something like that, and
when we got down to the lower floor, there was some large party of locals who
had gathered for a photo.
I turned to Taj and said, “Photobomb.” And she did not
hesitate. Just ran in, with this huge smile, ran into the photo, linking arms
with the surprised (and much shorter) person on the end. Hilarity and
flashbulbs ensued.
They LOVED it. Even had it been someone who didn’t happen
to be a 6-foot-2 muscular black woman, they still would have loved it. Heck, I
have people stopping me to take pictures with me, and I was not a six-time WNBA
All-Star. I just am American with red hair. That’s enough.
There’s no way the people knew who she was, but even
without that knowledge, Taj gave that group of people a story they will still
tell their grandkids.
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