Turn on the lights…

My girl had to suffer a blackout at her quarters in her school last week from 6.00 p.m. the previous evening till somebody came all the way from Sibu the following afternoon to see what the problem was. If I remember correctly, there was a blackout earlier in the week at dawn but by the time they were done for the day at school, power had been restored.

It seemed that there was a lot of finger pointing – mostly at the previous guy who was awarded the contract, for one, with accusations that the wiring was not properly done…and so on and so forth but the contract had since expired. From the look of things, I would put it down to poor administration and things related. For reasons known only to them, they still run on generators even though there are electricity lines all along the main road…and there’s no tap water supply even as well! Maklumlah, dunia ketiga kita ni! Vision 2020, my foot! Not that the school is so far inland, upstream or only accessible by some rugged timber road or something like that – it is right by the Sibu-Bintulu so-called “highway” and is only  a 1 and 1⁄2-hour drive from Sibu town.

Well, I guess if the problem lies in the wiring, whatever the source of the power supply, there would still be a problem…and hopefully, now that they got a guy from Sibu to check, such blackouts would be less frequent, if at all, from now on. That was why I bought her this…and now, she has this so it was not too bad for her. I wonder how the others staying in the “new” teachers quarters (and the students in the boys’ and girls’ hostels) could stand it – I would have marched into the headmaster’s office and raised a storm and run amok!

Anyway, that was why when she came home for the weekend, I wanted to take her for a nicer-than-usual lunch so we stopped by here…

…for their claypot chicken rice (RM20.00)…

…that she likes a lot.

They have a new sign now but personally, I prefer the old one – this one looks somewhat Chinese but no, it is not a Chinese restaurant nor is it a western one and no, the name is not French – I’ve mentioned that before and you can read about it in this post. I would say it is a fusion restaurant so you can get a lot of western dishes and some local and Asian ones as well…and some that may even be their own creation like this one that is new on their menu – their Japanese pork chop rice (RM14.90)…

…that we had, for instance. It was nice, the pork chop was nice and the rice mixed with whatever soup too especially when we mixed it with the seaweed…but it reminded me of Teochew porridge and no, I would not say it was something that would get us running back for more. My vote would still go to their very nice claypot chicken rice.

This (RM31.90)…

…however, would be something I would love to go back for – their lamb shank. I had seen it on their menu for a long time now and I thought that price tag was relatively cheaper than elsewhere here where  it could go up to the region of RM38-39.00 or even past the RM40 mark but I was thinking that probably, that would be a bit too much for us to handle especially when we would be ordering other thing as well. However, since I was going to pamper my girl a bit to make up for the aforementioned ordeal she had to go through, I went ahead and ordered it – we could always tapao whatever that would be left if we could not finish it.

My girl loved it…

…and so did I! It tasted really great and was so very tender, very nicely done indeed…and my girl enjoyed the mashed potatoes as well and yes, I thought it was good too. I certainly would request for a lot more of that the next time we order this…and they can skip the tomatoes and the (canned) mushrooms…if I could manage to get the message across to the sweet, young mono-lingual waitress, that is or perhaps I could just ask to speak to the lady boss.

We managed to finish all of it and most of the other two rice items but that sure was one heavy lunch, I must say. Never mind, as long as we all enjoyed the food and left the place…joyfully.