Today (by today i mean that I am up at 2:30 am) we are going to the Great Wall, but I am reminded not to look back in anger. Anger because I missed a great food opportunity. Maybe not anger, more regret, but that didn't fit into the Oasis song theme of this post.
Last night we rolled the dice and went for Chinese Hot Pot. (see fondue) Now I have been to a lot of different places in my life where I didn't speak the language at all, France, Czech Republic, Poland, Boston, to name a few. I have never encountered the complete lack of communication that I did last night.
We had some phrases prepared and our books at the ready. However, the major drawback to reference books is that you are ill prepared for any type of query or statements coming from the other side. The dinner started well enough, we were able to convey that we needed a table and that we were there to eat. Good so far.
The way the place operates is that they give you a clipboard with a list of things to eat. Problem here is that it was all in Chinese characters. So we couldn't differentiate between meat, fish, or soda. Pointing and making yummy sounds was not going to cut it here.
Jennifer tried to ask some questions like, "what would you recommended?" But we didn't understand the answer. Finally, I must have looked so pathetic that our waiter finally understood that we didn't, in fact, know any Chinese. He left and came back with an English menu. Saved! uh, sort of.
Now we had pictures and English words, but still had no idea of how to put an effective dinner together. So with the waiter standing over me, I flipped through about 35 menu pages looking for things that might be good to drop into boiling liquid. We settled on the mushrooms, steak and noodles. The problem now was the type of liquid, and the menu was not real descriptive. I picked something that had 3 different liquids in the pot. I figured that one of them had to be appropriate. What I ordered kinda looked like this with another middle section filled with a dark stock like liquid.
Note, here is where I missed the food opportunity. Selections on the menu included chicken kidneys, duck intestines, rabbit heads and other items that are not usually found on the typical Pittsburgh Chinese menus. This would have been an ideal opportunity to try something outrageous without jeopardizing my entire dinner to a bad choice. The hot pot is ideal for getting variety, and that is exactly why people eat it.
Ideally, our table should have looked like this:
(no picture available of our sad little spread of mushrooms, steak and noodles)
In the restaurant there is also a condiment bar. Now you would think that seeing the items would help. It didn't. There were pastes and oils and powders and beans. I didn't know what to do with this stuff, so we got a few bowls of various items and dipped our food in it. Turns out, this was mostly correct. The idea here is that you should create your own dipping sauce by combining ingredients. Wish I would have known or thought of that. I would have made a kick ass sauce.
Overall, it was a very good dinner, but I wish I had googled it first because I could have been better prepared to do some serious damage to the scrap animal part industry.
Next up, how cavemen ordered water.
u
Giving the shout out to TRUB, Three Rivers Underground Brewers from the Great Wall with a can of Beijing's own Yan Jing. 
