The Wandering Monkey

The Shanghai Dinner Experience.
I was walking home with my roommate, Zabi, and we stopped by a small restaurant on my street. It was a tiny shop which didn't have any menus in English. However, there were a few pictures of food outside the building, and I did eat there once before with a person who could translate for us.

So, Zabi and I enter the place and have a seat. "Ni Hao" (Hello) I say. So then I ask Zabi if he has a pen and paper, and he hands this over. I take the pen and begin drawing a beak, then a neck, and in the end what I hoped represented a chicken. But it sort of looked like a duck, so I flapped my arm like a chicken and went 'cluck cluck.' The waitresses gathered around started giggling, but they understood what I was getting at. Then I drew a big 'plus' sign and drew a picture of a hot pepper. OK, so a hot pepper is a little harder to draw, but they seemed to understand this as well. Then, I guestured to the waitress to follow me outside the building and I pointed to the sign with the food on it. She wrote some things down on her note pad and it all seemed to work out OK.

I got back to the table, and Zabi was looking a little out of sorts. "They seem to be OK with farting, here," he said, gesturing to the man seated with his wife behind us. Hey, these things happen, I think to myself. So we go on chatting. Zabi asks me to explain to him about the second-week fatigue that a visitor feels here. I told him I went through major fatigue in my second week. I didn't want to go out. Just getting out of the house and walking to the metro stop for an hour left you feeling very exhausted. I said this was probably normal, and since he was in his second week it's not unlikely that's why he felt the way he did.
We received our tea, and reflected a bit more on the situation. Zabi will be leaving next week to go back to Germany. He's scouting out for architect jobs and says there no work in Germany. And then it happened.
Pffft. Pllllp. Pft pft.
It was the guy behind us. He was indeed farting. I looked over, and his wife was sitting there, looking down at the table and not reacting in any way. I looked at the waitresses and the other people at the dinner tables, and they didn't react either.
"I guess this is just part of the experience," Zabi says. "They don't seem to think this is out of the ordinary."
After about 20 full seconds this experience was finally over. I was containing laughter and revulsion at the same time. "I can't look up," I said.
Thankfully some time passed before the food was presented. The waitress came by and dropped off a dish, and pointed at the chicken and the pepper written on the paper. It was not exactly what I had ordered, but it was quite good. Something like sweet and sour chicken. Then we got the other dish which I ordered from the picture, and this turned out to be fried tofu and vegetables. Quite good, too! And, about 10 minutes later, a fried chicken came out. The waitress pointed specifically at the chicken and said, "Ji rou" (which rhymes with 'zero' in English.)

"This is really good," Zabi said. "In Europe you would probably pay thirty Euros for a meal like this." The whole bill amounted to about 60 yuen, which is less than 10 dollars for the three dishes, rice, and tea.

This country is an adjustment in so many ways, that is for sure.