adventures in eating

One of the biggest problems with being almost entirely illiterate here in China is that when we go into a restaurant, we have no idea what food is available or what we are ordering. This being the case, Kitty and I have only gone solo to a real restaurant once so far, and we got lucky because they had a picture menu. Of course, the pictures were really small and we still had no idea what we were ordering until it came.

This is what we ended up with. Some cold noodle-esque things that may have actually been strips of some kind of seafood, some fried peppers and squid (not my favorite, though the peanuts in it were really good), some strips of what looked like canned cranberry sauce but was actually some kind of hawberry jelly, and a whole fish covered in all sorts of veggies and served on a giant contraption that kept its juices bubbling the whole time. Not bad, and we were able to take home our leftovers.

Of course, we're not always quite so lucky, even in the cafeteria where we can point to the food we want. Case in point: Kitty accidentally ordered chicken feet at dinner the other night. It was a somewhat terrifying experience when we figured out that's what it was and spent the rest of the meal watching it reach for us from Kitty's tray. Chicken talons make great toothpicks though! (Ewwww....)

Chinese mission #1: Learn more food words.