"Breakfast" at Mingdu hotel

Went for “breakfast” in the posh Pingguo MingDu hotel with Lin Hong and her daughter. The deal is this: you pay 10 kuai (about 70p) and you can eat as much as you like from a buffet that has a very good range of food – but the catch is that you can’t take any home with you, and you have to pay 10 kuai for every 50 grams you don’t eat. Needless to say they piled the table high with loads of food (as it was 10.30am and the breakfast stuff was being cleared away.

We all got stuffed of course, and had a couple of beers (wouldn’t have done so if it had been Stella though). Then Lin Hong took out the tissues from the envelope they came in and started putting some of the food in it to take back! Very inspired. Luckily we weren’t charged for the leftovers, which would have been considerably more expensive than what we did pay. Thinking about it, it seems pretty unenforceable to charge for the weight of the food you didn’t eat…you could just sneakily drop it under the table – I could see a funny Mr Bean episode coming out of this.

Lin Hong appropriating some cakes and looking very guilty.