Chicken Heart Kebob – It’s What’s for Dinner
As week two in China comes to a close, I’m happily starting to notice that sometimes passable or nearly passable Mandarin phrases are coming out of my mouth. Though mostly not. But after the first week of classes is almost over, I can see progress. I look at all the signs and advertisements on the street and play a game of character recognition every time I walk about. Just as the streets become more familiar, so do some of the characters.
But where my character recognition skills are being tried with elemental urgency is in the restaurant arena. With the cost of a simple meal being in the $0.50 - $1.50 range, I eat out every single meal, unless I just have a snack. For the first few days, immutably whatever I would ask for I would end up with a bowl of some beef noodle soup. And once or thrice, I would get a dish that as a picky-eater made me have the evil wish that while the Cultural Revolution was clearing out the past, they could have done away with a few-thousand thousand-year-old recipes. Before you castigate me for my overt culinary cowardice, I’m just saying that even in the humblest restaurant there are about 50 different options here, and I was never one for spinning a roulette meal wheel.
I’ve got down the characters for sheep, cow, chicken, meat, rice, kebob and noodles. A property of many Chinese characters is that part of the meaning can be derived from a component. So, faced with a new menu, I can play detective and identify the component that is found in many plant and vegetable related-characters. But I still have no idea what is going to come out of the kitchen, even after my garbled monologue to the waiter: “I don’t eat meat. I eat greens. No meat. Greens. Please.” Today, I got a plate of peanuts!
I’ve become a virtual vegetarian. Partially because after getting a tepid dish of meat, I happened to come across a nice article about tapeworms and how they spread. Even if the chance was remote, I like to keep the denizens of my duodenum to a minimum. Although really the most likely risk here is in eating raw vegetables or unpeeled fruits. Plus, even if it is cooked immaculately like in a lot of places, I realize how spoiled I have been (with the quality of cut meat or maybe just the more wasteful use that results in a different presentation) and I really have no desire to change too drastically what I’m comfortable eating unless absolutely necessary.
Enough with the state of stomach. Classes are going well, although I am thinking to focus more on the spoken language rather than memorizing how to write characters (whereas there is some emphasis on writing characters at BLCU). With computers, it is easy to type pinyin and then choose from a list of possible characters, so I really don’t think it’s worth my time to learn how to write every character by hand, although I’m learning how to read and recognize them. I don’t have a few years to spend. Writing is a technology, so unless I’m going in the calligraphy biz and my handwriting is a whole lot better in Chinese than in English, then I see using computers as a shortcut.
Tomorrow, if I can wake up on time, I’m going to go to the Great Wall.
But where my character recognition skills are being tried with elemental urgency is in the restaurant arena. With the cost of a simple meal being in the $0.50 - $1.50 range, I eat out every single meal, unless I just have a snack. For the first few days, immutably whatever I would ask for I would end up with a bowl of some beef noodle soup. And once or thrice, I would get a dish that as a picky-eater made me have the evil wish that while the Cultural Revolution was clearing out the past, they could have done away with a few-thousand thousand-year-old recipes. Before you castigate me for my overt culinary cowardice, I’m just saying that even in the humblest restaurant there are about 50 different options here, and I was never one for spinning a roulette meal wheel.
I’ve got down the characters for sheep, cow, chicken, meat, rice, kebob and noodles. A property of many Chinese characters is that part of the meaning can be derived from a component. So, faced with a new menu, I can play detective and identify the component that is found in many plant and vegetable related-characters. But I still have no idea what is going to come out of the kitchen, even after my garbled monologue to the waiter: “I don’t eat meat. I eat greens. No meat. Greens. Please.” Today, I got a plate of peanuts!
I’ve become a virtual vegetarian. Partially because after getting a tepid dish of meat, I happened to come across a nice article about tapeworms and how they spread. Even if the chance was remote, I like to keep the denizens of my duodenum to a minimum. Although really the most likely risk here is in eating raw vegetables or unpeeled fruits. Plus, even if it is cooked immaculately like in a lot of places, I realize how spoiled I have been (with the quality of cut meat or maybe just the more wasteful use that results in a different presentation) and I really have no desire to change too drastically what I’m comfortable eating unless absolutely necessary.
Enough with the state of stomach. Classes are going well, although I am thinking to focus more on the spoken language rather than memorizing how to write characters (whereas there is some emphasis on writing characters at BLCU). With computers, it is easy to type pinyin and then choose from a list of possible characters, so I really don’t think it’s worth my time to learn how to write every character by hand, although I’m learning how to read and recognize them. I don’t have a few years to spend. Writing is a technology, so unless I’m going in the calligraphy biz and my handwriting is a whole lot better in Chinese than in English, then I see using computers as a shortcut.
Tomorrow, if I can wake up on time, I’m going to go to the Great Wall.
brainfart by Daniel at
6:20 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home