mandag 21. november 2011

They eat dogs in China, right?

Spending three weeks in china during the summer will teach you a thing or two

1. Learn how to eat with chopsticks

Because despite the economic growth the country has been experiencing and despite the fact that it hosted the 2008 Olympics and the 2011 expo, china, a country of nearly 1.6 billion people does not encourage its citizens to speak English. Ok maybe that’s too harsh, but they certainly don’t speak the language. This would result in one going to any restaurant, fancy or not and not being able to ask the waiter to bring you a FORK instead of the mandatory chopsticks that are already on the table. Now personally this isn’t an issue for me, as I like to think of myself as a skilled chopstick user, however it did provide some great entertainment, watching my mother, with one chopstick in each hand, trying to get food in her mouth.



2. They don’t actually eat dogs on China

Ok so I can neither confirm or deny that. However I didn’t see any dog dishes during those three weeks. I did however see donkey meat (I didn’t try it) and at one point there was also an incident where the shady restaurateur couldn’t understand English and my father couldn’t understand what the items on the menu were, took my dad to the corner of the main dining hall, Removed the lid off of a large bucket only to reveal a very large toad. Apparently that’s what my father was pointing at on the menu. Needless to say we didn’t order that. Aside from those incidences and a couple of others where various beaks, talons and other bird-body-parts would show up on our table, China for me, was one of the greatest culinary experiences I’ve had in my life. Noodles and rice dishes of great quality, at fancy as well as shady restaurants, it beats the hell out of the sludge they pawn off as Chinese food here in Europe. A million different ways to make noodles, hundreds of ways to make chicken, and duck, oh the duck, the most delicious duck in the world. Even if they do eat dogs in China, I forgive them for the duck alone