Eating out!
Ah well,
Another rambling blog from me in cold Yan’an, yes it is cold, though right now the sun is shining and I have the curtains open so that I can make the most of the heat provided by the sun! However this morning I woke up and really didn’t want to climb out of bed and when I peeked through the curtains I could see a thin layer of ice on the inside of the window. This is a fairly normal happening here in the winter time!!
Still I know I can hide inside most of the day till I have to head out tonight to a banquet, this a goodbye banquet for one of the teachers who then heads to Xian tomorrow before heading home. She is in the midst of saying goodbyes, finishing outstanding work and make sure she is packed!
Last night a fairly large group of us went downtown to a hotel to eat, we the three foreigners choose the hotel because not only does it have a Chinese restaurant but a western restaurant as well. The good thing is you can order from both menus and end up with a mix of western and chinese food. The other good thing is that the Chinese restaurant side has large private rooms and they do not charge you extra for the use of said rooms. So with twelve of us in the party we were able to get a private room, which allowed us to be noisy and smoke free. It meant as well that we were not disturbed by other dinners. Eating here is never a quiet affair, in fact if the place was quiet well it would suggest it was not that good! So if you want a quiet meal here, then it is best to find a hotel that is foreign run and eat in their western restaurant. Otherwise expect a lot of noise coming from other tables for the most part!
We made the teacher who was leaving sit at the head of the table, that is in the chair facing the door, on a round table that is the top, the bottom is the chair with its back to the door, only really works if you are in a private room. Then after that all the Chinese were trying to get other people to sit in the next two important seats on either side of the host in this case the teacher who was leaving. That was easily solved by me telling people to sit there!
We then ordered a mixture of Chinese and western food, pizza and french fries and then a whole range of chinese dishes!! We ordered too much, I always end up ordering too much food at a chinese place. The rule of thumb is one dish per person plus one extra dish, that should include several cold dishes and several hot dishes, fish and soup to finish. I managed to forget that we had ordered western food and was trying to order the correct amount of Chinese dishes!! I still ordered less than the required 13 dishes, but we still ended up with too much food! Still we had a blast and actually ate up a fair portion of the food ordered, and the rest went home in bags!!
The funny thing is we were teasing one of our friends about eating more pizza, this because on my birthday she had come to the same place to eat western food with us and had demolished a whole pizza, so we had some fun just teasing her about that as she clearly enjoyed eating it! Still it was funny at the end because there was some pizza left over and she was quick to speak up and grab the pizza.
One of our friends now works in the media and it came up how as a result of his job he is receives threatening calls. He does more of an investigative type of work for a TV company. He just about put us all off ever eating Hotpot again. He did a program on their hmm underhand methods of saving money. I won’t go into it, but I doubt that many people will be able to convince me to go and eat hotpot anytime soon!
Anyway by the end of the evening the staff were glad to go, though it was not really that late, only about 9:20 we were still the last people in the place!! They didn’t ask us to leave, but various people kept sticking their heads around the door, subtle hints that they really wanted us to leave so they could clean up!
Tonight it is the more formal goodbye banquet, how serious it is depends on who is there! I guess we will see, though right now I have no idea what time this meal is happening!!