Adventures in Dining

Wherein our heroine becomes the center of attention while trying to pay the tax driver:

Matilda (at right) and I were quite adventurous yesterday. We took a taxi into town to have coffee. It costs about $1 to ride into town, then we took a bicycle rickshaw to a restaurant. We held up the dictionary with characters for "Chinese dining room" and "nice food" and let him choose where to take us.

After a long ride, we ended up at a hotpot restaurant. We had to call the interpreter to order food for us because the menu was in Chinese only and had pictures of raw food. The interpreter, Angela, is a university student available anytime by cell. We tell her what we want and then hand the phone to the Chinese person. Well, we ended up with raw thin slices of beef and chicken and lettuce and noodles. You add the meat to the hotpot and wait for it to cook: 1 minute for beef (delicious) or 10 minutes for chicken (it never tasted done, so I spit it into my napkin). Everything else was quite tasty.

Matilda and I play the "guess the final tab" game -- I guessed 120 quai and she guessed 200. We were afraid because there were both low and high numbers divided by a slash on the menu and we didn't know what we were spending. It was 98, or about $12.

The rickshaw driver waited for us while we ate and then took us back to where we started. When we asked how much, we had no idea what he was saying (usually we can understand numbers). Once again we had to get Angela on the phone. While we were standing there, a crowd started to gather around us, and when the phone came out the crowd got larger. The Chinese seem to like gathering around, and there's no such thing as privacy. The driver talked to Angela for a while then handed the phone to us. The verdict? "Whatever you want to pay,"she said. That was unfair to us but good business practice for him. We gave him 20 quai which was more than sufficient.