Food

For as long as I have anticipated this trip was as long as I have been looking forward to real Chinese food. After 2.5 weeks, I still love to eat it but the act of going to restaurants is exhausting. I have encountered this same thing when traveling other places but not quite at this level. In France I do get tired of the cheese courses and deciding between bone marrow or escargot, but here is a whole new level. The restaurants have ENORMOUS menus. I am not exaggerating. They are all over 30 pages, thankfully they have pictures, but that only gets you so far. many things are still undecipherable and can be hit and miss (see: fish intestines) Then they only give you 1 menu per table and I guess the way here is for one person to make all the decisions. That more often tends to be me, but others want input, so i end up reading the menus to everyone. Then the servers will stand at your table to take your order the whole time you are looking over the menu. It gets nerve wracking and even more so when they get tired of waiting and move away just when we are ready. Then I have to track one down and wave them over. Then they don't speak much English and I don't speak Chinese and so they try to interpret what we want and that is how we end up with boiling water instead of sparkling water or hot chocolate instead of tea.

Also, they don't have the same way of pushing drinks here so it is almost impossible to get another drink during dinner. The way here is that if you want something, you flag someone down and tell them what you want. I'm not saying it is a bad system because they don't think it rude to wave and call, but it is exhausting.

I will miss the food, but I won't miss the difficulty of getting it.