Re: OT: Junk/Dim S(ui)m

>I should have excluded large college towns!  Back in the days when I
>travelled to colleges on business, I found really fine Chin. restaurants in
>Lafayette and Bloomington Ind. of all places.  I may have been to China Gate
>on a recent trip to A2; don't recall the name offhand, in any case it was
>good, very crowded, and I was the only Westerner in the place.
Hey, let's hear it for Bloomington, IN!  (I'm a graduate of Indiana
University, Bloomington, and my husband went to grad school there.)  Ten
years ago, they had some great ethnic restaraunts in town.  They have or
had one of only two (I think) Tibetan restaraunts in the United
States.  (The library's Graduate Collection houses a very large collection
of Tibetan literature -- it takes up its very own section of one of
the  floors -- so there may be some special connection between Bloomington
and Tibet.)  The Trojan Horse was a popular Greek restaraunt.  I know very
little about Greek food, so I don't know how authentic it was, but it was
good.  Ashenda, IIRC, the Ethiopian restaraunt, very unfortunately, closed
and was replaced by an Italian place about 10 years ago, but not before my
"Stucture of Amharic" professor took us there for lunch and to review for
our final.  (Actually, Ashenda had just closed, but our professor knew the
cook and got her to make us some very authentic food.  We had the
restaraunt all to ourselves.)  I have no idea what may or may not have
changed in Bloomington in the last 9 years.  The last time we were there
was at the end of our honeymoon, even though we live only about 2 1/2 hours
away.  I keep saying that we have to take the kids up there sometime.  The
campus is so beautiful.  Most of the campus feels like a park, only it has
buildings in it.  When  they built the Chemistry Building, they constructed
it *around* a pre-existing tree.  There is a huge tree in the
courtyard....Then there's the Sudent Union.  I was told that it is the
largest student union building in the country.  I know that it was the
better part of a year before I stopped being afraid of getting lost in
it.  (The tendency to get lost is made worse by the fact that it is built
into a hilside, so you're never quite certain which floor you're on: they
all have ground-level entrances.)  Well, I have rambled.  They certainly
did have good food in Bloomington.

Isidora