Food ladies we have known

Here we have the proprietress of a hot pot restaurant in Shanghai.  There wasn’t any English in the place, or any photos; after we sat down at a table, she handed us a piece of paper with a list of ingredients on it, and a pencil.  “No problem!” we thought.  “This is what it’s all about!  Adventure!  Also, this lady hovering nervously over us right now seems real nice.”

And I mean, she was real nice, but she had this baffling mix of behavior: On the one hand, she was constantly laughing and smiling and clearly desperate to help us (to not lose face?); on the other, she absolutely refused to help us in any real way.  Ryan has some Chinese language apps on his iPhone, so first he called up “We’ll take your recommendation.”  She read this, laughed,wrung her hands anxiously, said some things to us, and gestured vaguely to the menu.  We pointed to another table and tried “We’ll have what they’re having;” she looked at them, looked back at us, laughed and handed us the pencil.  All out of tricks, we smiled and shrugged and handed her the pencil back.  In a frenzy of (insert whatever emotion that our cultural/language barriers were keeping us from understanding), she ran to the back of the restaurant to find her son, who then spent a solid five minutes trying and failing to translate the menu for us.  The poor guy was even more nervous than his mother; sweat poured off his face as he sat hunched over his cell phone, looking things up in his dictionary, muttering things like “These…vegetables.  And these…meat?”

The spectacle didn’t end until we actually got up, retrieved another table’s receipt, and copied their order onto our sheet.  When we handed it to the lady she was visibly relieved.

In the end I have to say her hands-off tactic was a good one, because we had no one to blame but ourselves when we got our dinner: A soup of pickled kale, chicken feet, and some kind of goddamned melon.

(This is either Ryan’s “It’s not so bad!” face or his “You win this round, hot pot lady” face)

THIS woman, though.  What a gangsta.

LADY
You want some dumplings?

RYAN & KATIE
(smiling)

LADY
Yeah you do.  Go sit over there.

RYAN & KATIE
(sitting down, continuing to smile)

LADY
Here’s your dumplings.  Do you want some beer?

RYAN & KATIE
(smiles faltering)

LADY
Beer.  Beer (points to a pony keg).  Do you want some beer?

RYAN & KATIE
OH BEER! (nodding enthusiastically)

LADY
Haha.  Here you go.

RYAN & KATIE
THANK YOU

LADY
Haha.

And then she brought us some deep-fried croquette things, on the house.  I will love you until I die, dumpling lady.

We had no meaningful interactions with this lady. I just wanted to show you that we ate stinky tofu (hot tip: it only smells like garbage!)(or maybe anything tastes good smothered in chiles and cilantro?).

Lessons learned?

July 30

Today we did a stupid thing: We got off our train to Shanghai too early.  In our defense, it was 7:30 in the morning (which is when the train was scheduled to get into Shanghai), lots of other people were getting off too, and the train station sure looked big and impressive.

“What have we learned today,” Ryan asked later, after we’d wandered around the station and its environs for an hour, sweaty, bleary, hungry and burdened by our bags as a) it slowly dawned on us that we were not, in fact, in Shanghai, and b) we tried to figure out where in the g.d. hell we actually were (answer: Wuxi, about 140 km off the mark).

“I have learned that there are other big cities besides Shanghai on this train line,” I said.  “And I have also learned that it’s important to ask people where we are before we get off the train.”

“I have learned these things as well,” Ryan said grimly.

But here we are safe and sound in Shanghai, only a couple hours late and about $7 short.  Our guesthouse is in a quiet, unfashionable part of the city with not many things to do or see, which will probably suit us just fine as we continue our busy schedule of sitting around all day.

Our rejection of sightseeing is starting to be influenced by our budget, and how we went w-a-a-a-a-a-y over it in Beijing.  This was partly due to  touristy things and travel (the Great Wall day trip wasn’t super cheap, especially after I insisted on taking the $6 per person cable car, up AND down the mountain, like a fatass)(also, by the time we got around to booking our train to Shanghai the only beds left were the super nice expensive ones, with soft mattresses and private TVs and blind masseurs and chocolate fountains and free drugs), but it’s also due to me and the crap I buy.  I haven’t yet looked at the budget spreadsheet that Ryan has put together but I’d be very surprised if there wasn’t a category called exactly that: “The Crap Katie Buys.”

So, we could use a couple days of nothingness to bring us back into the realm of financial responsibility.

Right after I go to the fabric market and get some dresses made for myself, I mean.

   

August 7

Well that sure was the last thing I wrote in my notebook and so here we are, all caught up in the present day.  Hello!

Although I risk making this travel blog even more boring than it already is, I feel like I have to explain my ridiculous gripe up there about how a $6 ride on a cable car can send our budget into a tailspin.

See, our daily budget for China is $100 a day (“…but we’ll definitely be able to keep it closer to $80 a day,” is what I used to say to Ryan before this trip started.  Ha).  Once you factor in the guesthouses (around $40/night in both Beijing and Shanghai) and how much our danged Chinese visas cost ($340, so, about $11 per day for the month we’re here), we’re down to a cool $49 of walk-around money per day.   And so now you see how Ryan and I can come to be standing at the top of a mountain, wondering if we deserve — really deserve — the $12 ride back down to the parking lot.

One other thing I feel the need to follow up on (read: publicly shame myself about) is my misadventure with tailor-made clothes.

I didn’t bring a lot of things to wear on this trip.  Like most Peace Corps volunteers at the end of service, I could not get rid of the contents of my sad, run-down wardrobe fast enough.  I’ve spent the last two months either throwing away the grody things or giving away the things that were still presentable but that I never, ever wanted to see again. “No matter!” is what I thought every time I got rid of another bag of pilled shirts and holey jeans.  “I’ll get new clothes in Shanghai!  They’ll be TAILOR-MADE just for ME and they’ll be PERFECT!”

This is the third time I’ve had stuff made for myself — once in Korea, once in Vietnam, and now once in China — and the third time said stuff has come out wrong in some way.  At the market last week I had a skirt copied, and that, at least, came out fine.  But the pants I had made were about two sizes too small; the dresses, two sizes too big.  I took the pants and the dresses to another tailor to get them fixed, and now everything is about one size too big.  So.  Fool me once, shame on me.  Fool me twice, you won’t be fooled again.  Fool me three times and Ryan smothers me in my sleep with tailored clothes I don’t want to wear.  I think that’s how that saying goes?

Anyway, if i wanted to spend money on ill-fitting clothes I would just go to H&M and buy myself some off-the-rack harem pants (which is exactly what I did this afternoon).