We pick a table at the window, so that we can gaze out over the sea, where the sun is setting. It's getting dark. Winter is approaching and the days are getting shorter. I've just picked up Rihanna Gaga from her daycare, where she spend a few hours while I did the shopping for the Indonesian buffet that I am going to cook tomorrow for friends. She's not going to school this week, nor the last week, because she is enjoying an extended autumn holiday while her school is moving to a new building. My girlfriend is going out with her friends tonight, so I thought it would be nice to have dinner out with Rihanna Gaga. First, I planned to do so in the afternoon, but then she was too busy playing with her dollhouse. So now we're here a bit later than we're used to.
The waiter is slow and seems to be rather out of touch with anything going on in the restaurant. And when I manage to get his attention and order, he seems quite uninterested. Rihanna Gaga picks a nutella pancake - reminiscent of the crepes chocolat she used to eat in Tunisia - and I take a pancake with cheese, mushrooms and salami. As a starter, we have bread with aioli and garlic butter. Alongside our food, I'm having a mint tea and Rihanna Gaga is drinking an apple juice - although she soon starts drinking my mint tea as well. The bread is brought: pieces of French baguette, but of a rather dull kind, a bit dry. Rihanna Gaga asks me what the aioli is exactly, and I tell her it's like mayonaise. She tries it and really likes it, so I keep making bread with aioli for her, while I stick to the garlic butter.
Then, the pancakes are brought and turn out to be - I must say - a bit of a disappointment. You'd expect a place that specialises in pancakes to know what they're doing, but the pancakes are slighly undercooked, sticking to our plates and tasting of raw dough. Rihanna Gaga seems to quite like hers, eating quite a large part, but I find myself struggling with my meal, which is even made more unappealing by a lack of salt.
That doesn't however, spoil our fun time together. Rihanna Gaga requested that I'd take a large magic scratch paper that she recently got. For the past few days, she's already had lots of fun with it, scratching the black away from a picture of a surrealist jungle night with tigers, bats, flying candy, planets and rockets. We've moved from just scratching the black away within the lines of the picture to etching our own patterns and now, since we've by and large finished the pre-printed picture, we're starting to make our own drawings. I draw figures from Alice in Wonderland and Frozen in the black and Rihanna Gaga makes intriguing abstract patterns - she's become quite good at making her pencil do what she wants it to do.
Then, she tires of the drawing and starts to explore the restaurant a bit, dancing to the hits from the eighties and nineties playing on the sound system. Suddenly, out of nowhere, a boy pops up, as a jack in the box. He's about Rihanna Gaga's age, maybe a bit younger, and personal space is clearly a concept that means nothing to me: he runs straight towards Rihanna Gaga and starts gazing in her eyes with his nose about two centimeters away from hers. She's taken aback a bit by this sudden appearance and tries to turn away, but the tiles a slippery and she falls down. Quickly, she returns to me and sits on my lap, but the boy remains unfazed runs after her, again brings his face very close to hers and sticks out his tongue.
After the initial shock, Rihanna Gaga seems to decide that another kid is still more fun than no other kid and they start running around the restaurant together. It's getting late and I tell her that soon we'll have to leave, but she doesn't want to go. I get up to pay anyway, and when I've done so, I see that the boy is also leaving with his parents. This turns Rihanna Gaga around as well: "I want to go home," she tells me and I put on her coat after which we walk to our bicycle.
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