Two Illiterates go to Lunch

Near campus, there is a street that is lined with eateries. These cater to the 35,000 students who attend our college and the two neighboring universities. All told, there's probably about 20 of them, but only two have English-friendly menus (one has English, the other has pictures). For the most part, the non-Chinese patronize these two establishments and avoid the others.

Wusses.

D and I decided to throw caution to the wind and try a popular place with a menu entirely in characters and without any pictures. We went armed with a list of common Chinese dishes in English, Pinyin, and characters. We figured that if all else failed, we could just point to something on our list and the server could indicate whether or not they had it at the restaurant.

The procedure at the place we chose is this: go to your seat, read the little paper menu, and check off the things you want on the paper menu itself. Then the server takes your menu with your checks and puts in your order. Your food arrives at the table as the kitchen makes it. This means that one dish might arrive well ahead of the others. The food sort of trickles to your table (this staggered arrival is the norm here).

We managed to find dumplings on the menu by matching up the characters on our list with the ones on the menu. Emboldened, we tried to find noodles ("look for the character that resembles a t.v. paired with one that looks like two people on a hill" and so on). We weren't having any luck, so when the server came around, we showed her our list of characters, which included the generic phrase for "stir-fried noodles" and she showed us something on the menu that kind of matched that. We also pointed to a beef dish on our list, and she checked off something on the menu that corresponded to it. Finally, we ordered a green veggie, without which no Chinese meal is complete (they usually just bring you whatever green veggie they've got that day).

All was going well until we tried to order water. We know the word for water, so we just asked for it rather than pointing to our list of characters. She looked confused (our pronunciation is horrible) but then indicated something on the menu. I told her that we wanted 2 of them, and she looked kind of surprised by my request (this should have given us pause).

So, to recap: we ordered dumplings, a noodle dish, a beef dish, a green veggie, and two waters.

Imagine our surprise, then, when this was brought to the table:



What you're looking at is sweetened red beans atop a bowl of shave ice that's been sweetened with coconut milk.

Minutes later, a second one arrived.



So now we have to enormous bowls of this stuff, which, when we ordered it, thought we were ordering water. We were dying of thirst, so we ate it (the ice was refreshing), even thought it was kind of bizarre to eat something so sweet before our "real" food. (We did try to order water again, but to no avail. The server kept telling us they didn't have it -- "meiyou". Later, we found out that the only beverage that this place sells is soy milk).

The rest of the meal was as expected, although we forgot to order rice, so we had to use our noodles to complement the beef dish (dumplings not pictured because we scarfed them down before I could get the camera out). Here is a lovely photo of our tasty food:



And here is a photo of a pre-meal Smiley D (you can see the restaurant's sign in the background. We think it kind of looks like KFC's sign, and we refer to this place as KFC2):