First time in Flushing

I've been to China, I've been to Chinatown, and now, finally, I've been to Flushing, Queens! It's about an hour on the subway (3 different trains) from where we live, or a 20-minute drive. We took the good old MTA, so I had time to listen to some last-minute Chinese lessons on my iPod en route!

Yesterday was Taiwanese Independence Day (and next year it'll be 10/10/10!) so to celebrate, Dumpling and I joined some of his friends in Flushing for dim sum. All types of Chinese/Taiwanese living in New York get really excited about eating in Flushing--it has a reputation for fantastic restaurants.

A brief, illustrated recap:

we ate at a huge restaurant called "Ocean's Jewels"

we ate in a private room with a chandelier at one in the afternoon...

...chairs were decked out in gold brocade with huge bows attached by velcro...

...and all the food (course after course of it) was shared on a lazy susan in the middle of the table. Everyone just reached in with those big gold-capped chopsticks and helped themselves to all manner of steamed and fried delicacies, washed down with approximately two hundred pots of hot tea.

A unique aspect of this lunch was that out of the fourteen of us crowded around the table, most were gay Taiwanese-American men! Not a segment of the population one often considers, but great company and very entertaining! There was another guy/girl couple there besides Dumpling and myself, and we were all packed around the table elbow-to-elbow jostling for food, spilling and dropping things, and being rowdy.

Hugo (the guy in the 'Taiwan' shirt) organized the whole thing and is a dear. He told Dumpling he was only going to speak Mandarin all day in honor of it being a Taiwanese national holiday, but there was another white person there (boyfriend of one of the G.T.M.) and also a guy from Hong Kong (where they speak Cantonese) so thankfully there was plenty of English being spoken as well.

We had some amazing--and beautiful--tea!
Those are chrysanthemum flowers! After lunch Dumpling took me to a tea shop where I bought some chrysanthemum tea to take home--it's basically a bag of dried flowers that you brew into a delicious golden tea. I feel like an herbalist or a princess when I drink it!

Spotted this sign on our walking tour of Flushing:
I started laughing and said, "This is where you can rest your noodles when they get tired!" My lunch companions thought this was awesome, too--they told me they had only ever read the Chinese characters and never noticed how funny the English part was!

So, happy independence day, Taiwan! Hopefully someday I can be in Taipei for the celebration! Stay tuned for more Asian-American hilarity in posts to come...