LOL! When our big Brad came out for jollies, erm inspections we would take them to what was laughably called the duck farm restaurant. In reality it was a single story house and the biggest room was dotted with with cable drums for tables and one large table in the middle which of group would monopolise. The decor was grubby and sparse with no glass in the windows to gain best advantage from any passing breeze. There were no table cloths or cutlery, only reusable chopsticks which one hoped had been sanitised in some way (but hadn't). The menus we all in Cantonese script and the waiters spoke no English. You planned your order by poking the point of a pen through the menu against the item you you wanted. Those who kne!w the drill would organise the explanations of what the squiggles all meant for our honoured guests. Bottled beer or canned soft drinks were served while the food was prepared and then served via a 'lazy Susan' a revolving centre platform in the middle of the table. As items caught your eye you would take some regardless of what you'd ordered and hope the good stuff didn't all disappear before you'd had your fill. Oh, I forgot there were old jam jars of cold tea on the table in which the chopsticks were stood to disinfect them (!!). No matter how much food (?) you ate, or how many beers you drank, the bill was always HK$10 per person -(~US$ 1.28). This tested the mettle of many a senior officer and more than one couldn't cope with what we'd described to them as our ethnic tour. However, I'll spare you the delight of the bathroom facilities, which were best suited to dire emergencies only. Let your imagination run wild...... .. or not!
Gosh, HK$10. This must have been quite a while ago. It sounds like a very fine restaurant, though. Your story of struggling through the Chinese menu reminds me of my friend Martin, an English guy who didn't speak Chinese. He was a tunnelling engineer on the MTR (the metro/subway system), and was working on an extension - if I remember rightly, it was the pink line out to Tseung Kwan O. Anyway, one lunchtime, he popped his head out of the hole he was digging (oversimplifying), and found a small local cafe. The menu was only in Chinese, but he didn't let that bother him. He decided to just point at three things at random, so he said, "I'll have that, that and that." The waitress looked at him in a confused way, with an expression that clearly said "Are you sure?". He thought he might have ordered ducks' tongues or bull penises or something, but decided he'd live with his choices and brazen it out. So he pointed at the three things again, and nodded, and the waitress shrugged, and said OK. She came back five minutes later with a coffee, a tea and a Coke.
ducks' tongues or bull penises@42. Seems odd to group these together. Picture menus make things easy. Absent those, I just walk around restaurant and point at appealing foods on other diners' plates. Is that impolite? Should I not do that? In self defence*, one can also learn a few characters for 'tongue', 'intestine' or whatever sinks your boat. For me, best choice by far is to let a native speaker make selections. I'd be OK with a large% of random items from any Chinese menu, but those in the know make better choices. ++ I enjoy visiting HongKong but it is now a very expensive place. Also, people talk so differently there...
lazy Susan@41. Remains a dominant restaurant fixture. One's reach thereto is greater with chopsticks than a standard fork. Also available: 50% longer 'kitchen kuaizi'. Bring those to dinner and you are a player.
Yes, my experiences are from back in the late nineteen eighties when things were much different, although I converted HK$ back then to US$ at yesterday's rate so.... who cares! It was cheap, if not cheerful but amused our trench humor. Embarrassing the brass without them being able to complain without losing face, well.. .. what more can I say? Interestingly, we share our facilities with members of the former Royal Hong Kong Auxillary Air Force at weekends. This gave us a break and them (civilians) the experience in military operations. In return they hosted us to a Chinese meal at Lau Fau Chan where they would order the food for us, translating where necessary before we all trooped of to a restaurant where they cook and serve up the food you brought them. This means the restaurants don't have to stock and preserve food, but simply cook the fresh items delivered to them. Even fish are sold alive from large aquariums in the fishmongers and you pick the one you fancy, (not always the one with the prettiest face)! And if something can be eaten, they will catch it, cook it and eat it. There is no way food in Chinese restaurants in UK can taste anything like the way it's really done in China. Have to say, there will always be a place in my heart for the Chinese.
Maybe to you, you BIGOT!!!!!!!!!!!! If a duck and a bull love each other very much, who are you to say that a duck's tongue and a bull's penis should never meet? What they do in the privacy of their own nest/pen/pond/field IS UP TO THEM. Your viewpoint is TYPICAL of the heterosexualhomospeciescentric viewpoint that IS DESTROYING SOCIETY. Why should a duck limit its love to just other ducks just because it makes you comfortable? Apart from that.... It was just two items of Cantonese food that I'm not a fan of. Also, lambs' brains, pigs' brains, other animals' brains, sea cucumber, and tripe. The trouble with a picture menu is that sometimes things aren't what they appear to be. Liver rather than beef, for example. But when it's the only option available, it's certainly worth a try. Pointing at other people's food is always a winner, because then you can smell it too. I often go for that when I'm in a country where I don't speak the language. The Japanese practice of putting wax models of each available menu item in the window is a very helpful one. Hooray! And it didn't even autocorrect. I do find that even if you do speak the language, it can be useful to get a local to order because they're aware of the local specialities. I've often been pleasantly surprised by things I'd never have thought to order myself. I haven't been back for about six or seven years. It was a great place to live, but I'm not sure I'd want to go back now, even though I still have lots of friends there. Things are going so dramatically wrong there at the moment that I think it might be quite depressing. They do indeed. And it's quite a difficult language to learn, because of the environment. In the mainland, your friends and colleagues, and the people you meet in the shops and stuff, don't speak English, so this forces your Mandarin to improve. In HK, a lot of those people do speak English, and this can hamstring your ability to learn Cantonese. Even after living in HK for 11 years, my Cantonese isn't brilliant. I can converse quite happily and understand about 80-90% of what's being said, but it isn't even close to my Mandarin.
Ah, well you're safe there. The HK Dollar has been pegged to the US Dollar at a rate of US$1 = HK$7.75 - 7.85 since 1983. That does sound ideal. And that sounds like it would have been fun. It's great that you were given the opportunity to interact properly with local people. I feel sorry for the Mainland soldiers in HK now: they're not allowed to interact with locals in the way that the British armed forces were. They're stuck in their barracks, and bored out of their minds.
About chopsticks, I just surveyed Ebay offerings: $130 - 'snakewood' (Holy CARP!) $10-20 - various metal including titanium, stainless steel, plastics, bamboo round vs rectangular that won't roll off of table My late Dad had a beautiful pair of Japanese lacquered chopsticks that came in a holder. I've actually been thinking about keeping a pair in each of the cars as an improvement over the split, disposals. Bob Wilson
Metal ones are for Koreans. They're quite hard to eat with. We made the mistake of buying a Dyson vacuum cleaner recently. You have to use a chopstick to clear the filter. It really is a stupid thing.
For some slippery foods, or with non-parallel faces, surface roughness of wood provides helpful friction. Is it a generally known thing that Japanese and Korean sticks are pointy, while Chinese are blunt?
Also, 'tail ends' are used to transfer restaurant leftovers to takeaway boxes. Prevent salivary transfer? So if you get ones that are too ornate there you have lost a function.
