All you can eat.

I don't eat out often in Auckland, and even if I do, I always order prawns or shrimps as they call it in America. The water engineer asked me why I always do this, and I tell him because we don't have it at home often.

On the water engineer's birthday recently, G requested we go to Cinta Restaurant. This cosy restaurant is run by my second sister Elizabeth's old school mate, William in Methodist School. The service is friendly. We ordered assam curry prawns, and Emily the co-owner suggested that she would give us a butter prawn, free of charge if we ordered a fish curry. We didn't mind, we ordered a snapper fillet assam fish curry.

During the meal, and as always I rehash this few favourite story of "when I was in Canada." By then, my cheeky husband would shake his head at the "Hungry ghost." This was in an era before he came into my life.

I was studying in Windsor University, which is by the Detroit River, facing the city Detroit.

My friends knew that there was a "All you can eat" seafood restaurant in a small town. It was quite a drive away, and a group of about twelve rented two cars and headed there. The American cars were very big, if my memory serves me right, we went in two Oldsmobile cars. We would have been okay if we didn't have two very obese friends who wanted to be resident passengers in the front seat. When the four of us squahed at the back complained, they retorted if we wanted them to sit at the back with them.

We were really hungry students, and as soon as we were seated, we signalled the waitress to take our order. All of us ordered shrimp, except one. A. very smartly ordered scallops. The orders came in a basket with chips and the shrimps were cooked in a thick batter. We ordered and reordered, ate and ate and then wishing we had split our orders to half of us ordering shrimps and the other half, scallops because A. was selfish and didn't want to share his scallops. We took some off him any way.

We ate and ate and our stomachs were bloated. At around 9.30pm, we were peeling of the batter and eating the shrimps. Perhaps the waitress saw us doing this.

She came and asked nicely, "Would you like to have your last order, the kitchen is closing soon."

We felt very embarassed and replied," No thank you, the shrimps were very nice."

Actually, the shrimps were not nice because there were more batter than shrimps, but we didn't have the heart to tell her.

If we did, the Canadian "Gordon Ramsay" might throw his pot of boiling oil that had been frying his shrimp fritters and scream, "F***! Out of my restaurant."

***Re: Eating out, when I was in Singapore, my girl friends and I used to have lunches. One of my favourite places is having "High Tea" in Shangrila Hotel***