Dinner

Contrary to what you expect, I paid very little attention to what DL said about bullet-biting and compensation. My mind was drove to an apparently trivial and unrelated matter.

It was the dinner per se at the palace of Pluto.

Yes, I mean the food.

To put it simply, the quality was no different from what you get from the hospital canteen. (As I told TL the next morning, I could definitely make the same dishes way better.) No, it was not just the deficiency of taste and flavor, but the all too obvious lack of effort in designing the menu and paying attention to details. For example, the three main dishes - fish, pork, and chicken - were fried in the same way with similar vegetables. The finishing dish (or what we usually call the carbohydrate) was rice fried (once again!) with egg-white and kale - and the latter was just carelessly cut into half-an-inch segments rather than finely chopped to fit with the size of other ingredients.

I suppose this is a recurrent problem, and our man from Pluto knows it all too well. Right from the beginning of the dinner he reminded his important guests, "Friends, it's just a humble dinner. There's no expensive dish tonight. You know, the catering of my palace is run by a social enterprise, and we have to make some allowance."

I tell you, this very statement drew my entire attention the whole evening.