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Wine & co Fooding :: Culture Abstract Architecture Characters Looking sideways Bizarre	Culture

		AUSTRALIA / TIBET / :: CHINA / JAPAN / MALAYSIA
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		Talking with the hands It can be really frustrating to travel in a country without being able to speak, read or understand the language, and with no hope to learn at least a minimum of useful sentences. We can not count on Chinese people speaking English either, as their English is most of the time really basic… even if some Chinese seem motivated to train their English with tourists, proposing to help you, let say, to find your hostel, even if they don't know where it can be situated, and they want to convince you they can help (never lose your dignity! ) and you follow and suddenly you realize you are really lost now and what you want is just find your hostel and take a shower since you have been travelling in a train for the last 24 hours and you are tired and now you have to say you are sorry and you have to take a taxi…



			Happily, there is always a solution to be understood even without speaking the language: express yourself with your hands… which can make a simple situation, like ordering food in a restaurant, become more than complex, surprising and funny… We didn't learn much of Mandarin, but at least we are now very good at pictionary… Choosing on a menu when there are pictures next to the names of the dishes is mostly easy, even if we have sometimes strange surprises, like these vegetable dumplings that were in fact fried bananas, or the chicken we thought we ordered that became sweet and sour tripes.
		We are always surprised when ordering on a menu in Chinese without knowing what we order. Being surprised and having the chance to discover knew dishes is more important than the result, which can be, for example, getting three different meats for breakfast, or more probably, to never know what kind of meat we taste. At least, we learned how to say "rice" and "not spicy", more elegant to say (but not more efficient) than when we had to imitate the spitting-fire-dragon (we are very good at that now!) Another way to order food is to ask the waitress to follow you, bring her to the different tables in the restaurant and show her what other customers have chosen and order it. Even like that there can be surprises, especially when the bill arrives…
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