Lius allude raid

My Mom told me not to go down any dark alleys in China. So, when we stepped into the gated passageway I made sure to ask Jon if he thought it was a “dark alley.” We looked up and around and concluded that it was pretty bright; so we kept on walking.

Inside the narrow corridor were vendors selling rice, noodles, meats and vegetables. We actually found the place by tracing the line of Chinese people who were carrying take-out boxes from this area.  We figured that it must be good.

The infamous noodle shack

This was our first venture to eating “street food”. Until then, we’ve only tried tacky Chinese fast-food (like McDonalds, but with Chinese food) that had names like Kung Fu and a picture of Bruce Lee plastered on the front. As you can imagine we were pretty proud at how brave we were to eat like the locals.

Five minutes into our meal a man starts to excitedly tell us something in Mandarin. He’s smiling, so we’re not too alarmed. What was unsettling was what the people inside the make-shift restaurant were doing. Between flipping the noodles on the wok, they frantically started to pull everything into their stall and shut the garage door-like contraption.

I don’t know if it’s the Guangzhou heat or the genes, but somehow after lunch many shop owners will cover their wares and take a snooze. I thought this couple REALLY needed their nap for them to suddenly close up and try to kick us out.

Even the food lady in the back packed up and disappeared.
Look at how much noodles you get for $1 per plate!

Meanwhile, the man with the grin is still trying to tell us SOMETHING. It sounds as if he wants us to leave, but we can take our time and not leave?! Then Jon insists that he recognized a key word – police. Police? Ooh, this was getting exciting!

We got the owners to open the hatch and pass us some take-out boxes so that we could eat on the road … literally, by the way.

We laughed as we walked down the street, and then we saw the police giving tickets to illegally parked cars. Hmmm, should we stick around? Nah, it would ruin the adventure we already made up in our minds!