Dining in China

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Okay, okay, its been almost two weeks and there is much updating to do. When I last wrote, my stomach was playing all sorts of tricks on me. Well I'm happy to say that within a few hours I recovered from that and everything has been okay since. Thanks to the delay we spent all sort of time dining in the area. Everyone had been warning us that Chinese food in China is nothing like our Americanized version back home, and they were right - this stuff is way more delicious. There is dim sum (our favorite) and all sorts of saucy, amazing dishes to be had.

Dining is like a way of life here, people go out for a little lunch/dessert/dim sum/whatever some 6 times a day so the restaurants are packed to the gills and sometimes 4 or 5 stories tall. Apparently Guangzhou, aka Canton, is where most of the food that we know as Chinese comes from so essentially we are getting the real deal here. 'Real deal' also means more dishes of pig intestines, chicken feet and pig penis than you thought you'd ever see, but hey, if you choose carefully its good. Let's just say we were happy they had an English menu.

Beside the overabundance of penis, dining in China is an interesting experience. There was very little English in Canton so we got to find all this out the hard way. Here's the night out:

First you will stumble in awkwardly, they look very excited and you escorted to a table. Then they arrive with ONE menu for the table, no matter how many people are dinning with, and plop is down in front of whoever looks most important (myself, naturally). "Menu" really isn't the right word for it, though. Think more like 'short novel'. There is usually about 15 pages or so of dishes, nearly 200 in total and you have, seriously, 20 seconds to decide. In that time a very nice, petite girl will come with an expectant look on her face. If you point to your watch and tell her you need another minute, you have bought yourself exactly 15 seconds until she returns. Repeat at least 5 times.

When you make up your mind and your food arrives said girl will stand DIRECTLY beside your table and watch you consume your whole meal. This is just because we are foreign and they are trying to help but I cannot emphasize how incredibly awkward is it to have someone stare at you while you take every bite. If you have a SIP of tea she will refill it. If you mess up, she will correct you. If you drop something with your chopsticks she will giggle and run to fetch the restaurant's only fork. Then, Rich will decide that we needs to order hot sauce or something like this and we will spend five minutes playing sharades. She will return will a random sauce from sweet and sour to chilli or soy. Good times.

The other thing is they will not bring you the bill no matter how long you sit there. Eventually we found out that they have one cashier at the front which takes care of all they money... I think because they don't trust the waitresses to handle money. That one took a while to figure out.

We also had an interesting meal or two in the next town, Yangshou, but I will let the pictures tell the story of that one....

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Comments

[anonymous]

Glad to hear you guys are having quite the adventure! Thinking of you both lots-Love Carla

[chelsea]

awe come on, you didn't try the grilled rat???