"Do you want to eat something?" Josie asks.
"Sure."
We walk over to some city rental bikes and try to check them out. Josie tells me it will take three hours to verify my identity, so we end up walking.
The streets of Nanjing are filled with people, I finally feel like I am in a real city. The amount of electric scooters is dramatically less. A young boy (maybe 2 or 3) walking in front of us has a slit in his jeans so his entire butt is exposed. I point this out to Josie, who does not find in humorous at all.
"You don't have pants like this in America?"
"No, not really. I mean little kids can be naked but they don't really make pants like this."
I think Josie hates me almost as much as Peter does.
After walking for about twelve minutes, we reach the restaurant. Josie is exhausted.
"Too far. We are walking too far."
I don't know what she is complaining about, she choose the restaurant. We walk into a hotel lobby and take an elevator to the fourth floor. When the doors open, 7 different hostess begin to happily shout completely different things at us in Chinese. Josie starts following one of them and I trail behind them. At the end of a little hallway, Josie heads to the left and the hostess heads to the right. I follow Josie, but the hostess runs after me and grabs me. Josie was going to the bathroom.
I sit down at the table and am given a hot towel. I don't know if we are supposed to use these on our faces, but I do anyway. The waitress comes back with two large jugs, one filled with lemon water, one filled with a mysterious black liquid. I have a glass of the water. Josie finally comes back from the bathroom.
"What do you want to eat?"
"I don't know what anything is."
"Do you like spicy?"
"Yes, yes I really like spicy."
Josie orders a bunch of things from the menu, and then takes me over to the self serve sauce station. I take a bunch of different sauces and put them on different parts of the plate. Josie laughs at me for this. Apparently, I'm supposed to put multiple sauces in a bowl. The plate was for fruit. I got back and make a peanut garlic sauce, and a spicy oyster sauce.
The waitress brings out a vat of hot oil that is split down the middle. On the left is regular oil, on the right is a red oil that is filled with chili peppers. I barely use the regular oil at all. Josie has ordered beef, tripe, two kinds of tofu, mushrooms, a strange purple steak that turns out to be shrimp meat (delicious), and some sort of thin stringy fish meat that Josie was never able to properly translate for me (maybe the best thing on the table.) Everything was absolutely delicious. I am in Hog Heaven.
Throughout the meal, I have lots of difficulty with my chop sticks. Because its my first time in the restaurant, they comp us a free ramen show. A man comes out with a small piece of dough and he begins to swing it around his head and spin around. He seems like a kid with one of those sticks with a piece of string on it or a raver with with some glow-up light sticks, only much more bored. He then rips the dough into pieces and tosses it into the hot pot. I can't, for the life of me, grab the noodle with my chopsticks, which Josie finds very funny. I try to explain to Josie that in America I am a fool, but she does not understand. I also try clown or idiot, but she does not understand. I guess there isn't a Chinese equivalent.
I ask Josie what the black liquid is and she tells me to drink it. I do, but can't decipher the taste. It almost tastes like Jamaica, but it's much better. Sweeter. I drink about 3 glasses (the food is very spicy, before Josie is able to correctly translate it. Prune juice.
I eat so much food. Needless to say, towards the end of the meal, I start feeling some quite intense rumblings. I politely excuse myself and walk to the bathroom. Even in a restaurant as fancy as this one, their toilet is a hole in the ground. I open the stall and, remembering Old Gaochun, check for toilet paper. There is none. I leave the stall, find a roll by the sink, rip of a few pieces, head back into the stall and start defecating. Despite having floor toilets and no toilet paper, the stall doors are slightly above ground level so you can peak under to see if the stall is occupied. In America, all you can see is a persons ankles under the stall. In China, I imagine all you can see is a persons testicles and butt-hole. After finishing my business, I head back to the table.
For an after meal treat, the staff has brought out some sunflower seeds. I eat two and Josie laughs very hard. I guess they eat sunflower seeds differently here too. I tend to chew the whole thing up and then spit a giant gob onto the floor. Josie apparently tells the wait staff I love sunflower seed because they soon come back with a giant bag and hand it to me. If this was a prank, I would have thought it was very funny but I think Josie is just trying to be nice.
As we leave the restaurant, we notice a girl having fake nails put on in the waiting area.
"It is free if you eat here."
"Really? That's cool."
"Do you want to do it?" Josie laughs very hard at her joke.
"No, I'm okay. Maybe next time."
Josie suddenly gets very serious.
"If you do this people will think you are-" Josie begins to twirl her finger around her ear, which I guess is the international sign for crazy.
While walking back to the car (Josie doesn't remember where she parked so I am leading,) Josie stops and looks off into the distance.
"What's up?"
"Over there is a very famous Nanjing landmark, the Confucius temple. Would you like to see it?"
"Sure."
Josie shakes her head.
"I am too tired. Let's go back."
On the drive back, Josie asks "How are you feeling?"
"I feel okay."
"I don't feel too good. Your stomach is very good."
A few minutes later, Josie pulls over at a gas station and disappears for about 20 minutes, I assume to shit her brains out. I can't bring myself to tell her I shit at the restaurant, and just let her think I have a gut of steel.
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