My daughter Susan and son-in-law Gerry are travelling in Malaysia. I get reports of the wonderful experiences they are having in a blog she has set up, and many of those wonderful experiences concern food. She is having a much more satisfying time of it than did Beverly and I during one restaurant foray in Nanning. You can read Susan's description here, https://hellomalaysia.mataroa.blog/blog/the-food-part-2/ but let me set the scene of my (mis)adventure by babbling on a bit.
I was in a weekend course once and to break the ice, a smiling young woman came to the microphone to give us some basic instructions. She opened with, "In playschool and kindergarten, there's only three things kids want to know and they are:
When do we eat?
Where's the toilet?
When's my mommy coming to get me?"
She then proceeded to answer the first two for all of us and concluded with, "And your mom ain't comin to get ya." Cute, but effective.
I use that conversation as a guide when I'm in foreign lands. I use it at home too, but that often doesn't end well, with some variation of the last comment usually closing all discussion. In those far lands however, restaurants are particularly fraught experiences if I'm unfamiliar with the language of food, and I often am. That never bothers Beverly.
I married an artist. The lady sculpts, paints and doodles. She writes little post-it notes and puts her own funny faces on them. She’s was doing emoticons before they began to breed themselves over every electronic communication on the planet. This skill, predilection, (addiction) has had mostly beneficent outcomes in our travels, for when vocabulary failed us, the pencil would save the day. Now and again however, the consequences were not what we expected.
After a month in Nanning, we felt ready to slip the halter of student guides and take ourselves out for dinner. The kids were always willing to go along as interpreters, and buying them a meal was never expensive and they got the benefit of an English tutorial for a few hours. One Friday evening, probably after too much TGIF libations, we decided to strike out on our own.
There was this excellent restaurant we had heard of, just down off main street a few blocks and turn right by the tracks and over there a bit and you couldn’t miss it. We missed it. After almost an hour of walking, we just wanted sustenance and hied ourselves in at the next eatery.
We were well received by the usual smiling hostess who chatted away as she showed us to a small private dining room as was the custom in many restaurants. We noticed that all of her friendly chatter was in Chinese, but were certain that there would be someone on staff with enough English to be sent in to take our order. Not so. Well, maybe the menus would have pictures on them to help us order. Nope, just lists of Chinese characters delivered by another smiling chatty young person. B was undaunted and kept smiling and chatting back. I was hungry and my smile muscles were too.
Beverly asked for the server’s pencil and began sketching her desires on the paper table covering — vegetables, lots of veggies such as celery, carrots, bok choy. The servers gathered around to study her drawing as it became more elaborate, and then one of them let out a triumphant shout and told everyone what it was that we wanted. He pointed to parts of the sketch, others nodded in agreement and everyone assured us they would serve us our desired dish and left to order the meal.
Well, we needn’t have worried about vegetables, mostly because meat is a luxury in most Asian diets. We received great platters of noodles and veg, rice and veg and then, carried in triumphantly, a dish of steaming prawns.
Well, we hadn’t expected the prawns, but we settled in to do them justice, and enjoyed a wonderful meal. If the restaurant wasn’t the famous one we’d been told about, it was certainly in the same league. We did feel a bit funny about those prawns though and tried to get an answer from our servers. B pointed to her vegi-doodle and looked questioningly at the various platters on the table. Which was it?
Of course they pointed to the prawns and that left my artist wife a bit miffed as she felt her depiction was unmistakeably vegetable-like. The server was giggling however and B had to have an explanation, and she got it. He pointed at the drawing and then indicated a smiling young lady who had been in on the initial conference. Yes, she had thought what? Then he really cracked up as he tapped his shoes.
When we had finished and had collected bags of leftovers (and there are always leftovers in a Chinese restaurant) we took a taxi to get us back “home.” And we left the sketches and pencil behind. Deep-fried sandals are not in my diet plan.
So, if that anecdote left you hungry for more, you can go to that aforementioned daughter's blog site and sign up. As for me, I'm going to trade slippers for sturdier footwear and go shopping. I'm getting hungry.