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?

Simplicity

I can't count the number of times in my life that I've wished things were simpler. There are plenty of days that it seems technology has unnecessarily complicated things and that we'd be better of the way things used to be. Somehow, for me, that would be the time of the pioneers. I have no idea why! You'd think I'd go back to New Testament times, or even Adam & Eve.

But what does simplicity really mean?

Does it mean having fewer choices at the grocery store?
Does it mean not having your own car?
Maybe it means forgoing heat in the winter?
Maybe it just means having someone to clean your house?

All of those things are true in my life, yet I don't feel the simplicity of it. I feel the discomfort. I'm cold in church and at the grocery store. I long for the days when I didn't have to plan my winter wardrobe based on which building I was going to visit. As I'm being driven to the hardware store 5 miles from Carrefour instead of the one around the block, I'm wondering how to ask my driver what we're doing without embarrassing him. True, I don't have to clean my floors or my bathrooms, but I'm still living with someone making piles instead of putting things away. So here I am with what seems like a simpler life that really isn't any less complicated than before. It's just different.

I can't go back to a simpler time. There may be a simpler place on this earth, but I'm not sure I want to live there. I'm learning that the mystery of simplicity lies in personal preference. The World English Dictionary defines simple as "consisting of one element or party only, not combined or complex." I think that means life can only be simple if it's just me. If that's the case, I guess I don't crave simplicity. One isn't enough for me! So starting today I'm going to stop yearning for something simpler and embrace what I've been given - this complicated life! To borrow from our preacher on Sunday - I'm going to take the Shanghais with the Shanglows. God, please give me the grace to do so.