Ni Hao

A passage I stumbled upon from my journal in Qingdao, China:

As a couple days passed of settling in, my traveling buddy Sarah and I decided to find a quaint restaurant for lunch. We stumbled upon what mimicked a shack with a chinese symbol that we had come to learn meant "Restaurant". The inside, no bigger than a classroom, smelled of fresh fish clearly just caught from the ocean not four miles from where we stood. My immediate inclination was communicating in English was not going to be an easy one.

"Ni hao!" spoke the tiny smiling woman behind the fish counter.

"Ni hao!" Sarah and I timidly replied.

Through several hand gestures and sign language both parties came to the conclusion that a table for two was indeed what we wanted. As we opened our menus the only thing we could rely on were the pictures. We used what little Chinese we had learned in class, "pijio", or beer, being our favorite word of the day. Through another series of pointing and pantomiming with the waitress we proudly basked in our ability to communicate what we wanted. Little did we know lunch was not going to be so little.

Roughly 15 minutes later, in one fell swoop, a large pot of fish head soup, echoing a bucket of chum on a fisherman's boat, was laid before us. Both of us, jaw dropped, looked around at fellow patrons of this restaurant and keeled over laughing. Apparently the pictures were very deceiving as to what we actually ordered. Next came a bowl of rice big enough to feed the entirety of the restaurant. We continued to gawk as a pile of garlic stems (one of my favorite dishes) adorned the rest of our feast. We sat back not quite knowing if more was to come but after a few minutes we grabbed our chopsticks and dug in. This was not the first time we had fish head soup and it was certainly my favorite of all the dishes I tried. The meat is especially tasty within the cheeks, the Chinese cuisine is full of pleasant surprises.

After putting a miniscule dent in the dishes our fish head soup was poured in plastic bag and we walked out as if we were proudly leaving a pet store with a brand new beta fish. It was a moment we both vowed to share only in our memories as we both managed to forget our cameras. Shucks.