Lunch Choices

The catalyst for this post is M's lunch today. His lunch, a selection of items in the cafeteria, is provided by his employer, so most days he takes advantage. But before I get to that, I want to tell you about a lunch I had a few months ago that I haven't taken the opportunity to blog about before today.

A couple of months ago I was out shopping with my friend, K. She had told me about a fabric market and asked if I'd like to go with her sometime. I'm not one to turn down a trip to a market with someone who's already familiar, and besides loving fabric, K is one of my favorite people to hang out with here so of course I took her up on the offer! This particular market, Qing Fang, is about an hour away from our neighborhood which means we needed to get some lunch while we were out. On top of that, we knew K had a Mandarin lesson that afternoon so we had a specific timetable to stick to.

Now, if any of you have ever shopped with me, you know I can cram a lot of shopping into one window. I'm not slow, but I also don't finish quickly. That's because there is always more to see! K is the same and together we weren't doing ourselves any favors. Besides, there are many hundreds of stalls to look at - we were kidding ourselves to try to cram this trip into a couple of hours!

Before we knew it, we were almost out of time, and HUNGRY. No time to find a McDonald's today! We followed our noses to the food and quickly realized that we were WAY out of our league.

There was no English menu.
The restaurant with the picture menu was closed (or doesn't serve Westerners?).

So we hit the cafeteria-style restaurant line. This starts with a selection of raw vegetables and meats. We get a basket and add what we think looks good (or familiar/safe). We give the basket to the cashier and pay our $2 (no joke!), then move to the cooking area. The cook adds our ingredients into a basket (one for me, one for K, about 10 others are empty) in a large pot of boiling water. Or at least I assume it started as boiling water. Now it's become a community broth, flavored by whatever meat and veggie choices have passed through to this point on this day. Once everything is cooked, it is dipped back into a large bowl with a healthy scoop of broth and we are asked if we want any seasonings. I have no idea what the seasonings are, so I point at a few and they are added. The cook lets me know that one is spicy and I motion that he should only use a little. They give us our food and we're done. But wait! We wanted some of the cafeteria-style selections. Back to the register I go where I use a series of hand motions to describe what I want. After only a little confusion, I end up with a meat/peanut dish and we grab a table.

The soup was interesting. I wound up with what I think was pork. K had chicken that was MUCH tastier. We both had noodles and some bread in our soup. We were both more than a little afraid of what we had gotten ourselves into and were happy to have the peanut chicken dish. We were also happy to have had hepatitis vaccinations.

This is the kind of experience that makes your vacation exciting, yet makes you wonder about the place you live.

For that matter, so is what M was offered at lunch today:

Boiled bones anyone?