Blast from the Past

Before getting to Day 2 here is an old email about my trip in China, a linguistic adventure


Matt and I last night went out to dinner just him and I. Jed went on a date with Jen since he hadnt seen her the whole day. We decided to stick close to our hostel but try and to go to an authentic place for dinner. We had an enormous lunch so the theme for the night was "light." We tried one restaurant but didnt like the menu. We then moved to this other restaurant that had an outdoor area with the Olympics on a big screen tv. By the way, everyone is watching the games. In Shangri-la, at night, all the sounds were the synchronized sounds of the tvs on the same olympic event. In any case, in this huge outdoor area, it was us and the wait staff. They brought us a menu. To fully appreciate what happened next, you must understand Matt and my combined chinese linguistic repertoire consists of:

Bathroom?
a tofu dish
waiter
No MSG please
Thank you
dumplings
I dont want that

So scoring at home, we know two dishes. This proved to be problematic as the menu was in chinese, and they did not have our two dishes that we knew how to say in Chinese. Once this was established, the head chef (an older lady) began explaining things on the menu. She talked like we understood and Matt and I kept putting our hands up as we had no clue what she was detailing. We tried telling her that we wanted her to choose, but this lead to another barrage of explanations by the women. At this point, Matt and I just kept laughing and so did the wait staff. (the older woman was not amused.) I had a great idea to try and draw pictures. So Matt tried to draw a tomato, onion and a pig. Matt has many talents in a lot of areas, art is not one of them. This only confused the lot of waiters now interested in this two crazy foreigners. Finally this sheepish waitress spoke up and said rice. We immediately treated her like she was Shakespeare. Now we had battle going on of who spoke less of the other person's native language. We established that she knew:

Rice
Eggs
some conglomeration of lettuce and potato.

The linguistic royal rumble ensued and to say the least, things were not progressing smoothly. The idea popped into my head to go to the kitchen to have them show us the food. This turned out to be the wrong idea as seeing a kitchen in China does not add to your hunger, more like make you want to high tail it out of there. We were shown things that I am not sure if it walked, got planted, or was put here by aliens. In any case, we ended up wanting rice with eggs. We got rice, fried eggs and some fried potatoes. You must remember that this province is the culinary capital of china and Matt and I were plowing through starch with not a nutritional or tasty spice in sight. We decided that like the potato, we were fried and left. So we went to a tea house. Chengdu is known for its tea houses. Men and women come to these establishments, from the outside they look like restaurants, but all they serve is tea. Mostly people come and pass the time here drinking tea and playing a variety of card games or a game similar to dominos.
We sat down in a tea house and attempted to get beer. Yes, Matt and I went to a tea house for beer. I did not say that it is all cultural and linguistic problems. There are some boneheadedness by us as well. We got blank looks and one waitress handed us a chinese menu. We have had the same look of total inability to understand and no joke her reaction was " ohhhhhhhhh, c'mon" I added the c'mon for effect, but this generally describes how disgusted, frustrated, and the hilarious disdain she had for our lack of chinese. We got tea finally and sat and played cards.