Mei you Mayo (mei you="don't have")

I look outside into what looks like the Swamps of Sadness from The Neverending Story, where the hero Atreyu meets Morla the Ancient One. The weather can't decide if it wants to rain or not. So we see an incredibly thick haze with heavy air and the occasional drop of rain. I walked to the nearby village with one of my colleagues, and we were constantly putting up our umbrellas, then putting them down. The air was so thick that it also felt warm, so we ended up carrying our warm clothes by the end of the trek.

In the village we ate a common Chaoshan delight, which we call "big noodle" for lack of a better term. The premise is that the dish is one big layer of soft dough. A scrambled egg is poured over the dough and then whole thing is cooked, either on a flat grill or in a kind of special oven with layers of jellyroll pans that pull out like drawers. They the whole thing is folded up with some green vegetables, and soy sauce and preserved vegetables are sprinkled on top. I prefer some peanut sauce too, but the place we went to today didn't have it.

We walked around the village for a bit. We didn't find anything that we needed. Many of the stores are still closed from whatever holiday just happened. I DID find some Hellman's mayo, though. It's has both the Hellman's and Knorr labels on it, but I don't know if it's the good stuff.

I had three choices: light blue label, dark blue label, and yellow label with pictures of pineapple on it. All of them had sugar, so I chose the dark blue label because of the resemblance to Hellman's and because of the pics of veggies on it, which suggested savory instead of sweet. Buying things in China is always an adventure.

-吴佩芙