oh my

So I'm going to start using some Chinese whether you like it or not because it helps me tell my stories better and you might pick up some Mandarin from this blog ; )

Ok, I know dining stories are getting kind of old, but not for me! I am not lying when I say that mealtime is always a huge ordeal because we first have to pick a place to eat (cafeteria's closed for the holidays), and then we ask "ni yao tsai dan yingwen ma?" (do you have an english menu?) and inevitably they never do anymore. Sometimes we'll get lucky and we can eat there because there will be zhaopian (pictures) on the menu, but you never quite know what you'll get when you base your order on pictures. So this time we picked a nice picture and we got the food and it was reallllllly good, but super spicy hot. I look around and I see that all the Chinese people are eating hot pot, which is this really hot bubbling oily liquid into which you put food and it cooks. The tables have a big hole in the middle for the hot pot basin and underneath is some source of heat... it's really neat because I hadn't seen one like that yet. And let me tell you this, if it's edible, the Chinese will throw it into the hot pot and eat it. There were noodles and vegetables and meat galore and I was kind of like hmm... I really want to try that. But anyways, that's not the funny part. The poor waitress (fu yu wan) stood there forever as we looked at every single picture in the huge menu book and then I would say "zheige shi shenme ma?" (what is this?) and point to each picture. I've learned the characters for different meats so that I can avoid fish at all costs, but the problem is that they're not always the same. For example chicken is "ji rou," rou means 'meat.' But when I want fried noodles and chicken and peppers, it's called "jisi chaomian." Ji rou and jisi are not the same character, obviously... so that's tricky for me. By the way jisi chaomian is probably one of my most favorite foods ever, at least Chinese food, and it tastes like tian (HEAVEN) and I wish I could have some right now.
So anyways, as I was saying, our food was awesome it was just really spicy. And when I say 'our' food I mean it because here in China you usually don't just get your own plate of food that's different from everybody else's. We typically order a few large dishes and everyone eats from there, family style. It's cool because you can try a lot more and if there's something you don't like there's other food there too. Today it was just me and Lauren so we got one dish and it was great, and we always get some mi fan (rice) to go along with it. The funny thing is, the more I eat rice with all kinds of food, the more I like it. I'm not sick of rice at all, and I always want it with my food now. I just don't want plain rice, I like to put stuff in it.
So we're eating our good food and spitting out all the bones without caring, and we look over at the big table next to us. I don't know what the family ordered for their hot pot, but I am not exaggerating when I say there were huge piles of large bones like ribs and vertebrae on the table. Lauren and I were wondering WHAT ON EARTH DID THOSE BONES COME FROM? They were so big, they could have been human. I never saw the waitress bring out a huge side of cow or anything like that, so I am really curious as to what they could have ordered in which the end result looked like an archaeology dig or a CSI crime scene. It was morbid and we just started laughing because it was one of those times when I think we really didn't want to know the truth.