THE Lowly Peon

banquets! 
28 November 2007, 7:11am

for those of you who haven't been to china, i apologize, as you've never had a real chinese banquet style meal. i've missed the hell out of them since i've returned to the states. when a chinese person hosts, (s)he'll get a zillion dishes even if there are only a handful of people eating. what's great about that is that you never need to force yourself to eat anything, there's always good food, and odds are good you'll fall in love with at least a few dishes so you look very grateful and the host feels good. i love chinese banquets. today for lunch, all of bray hong kong (a whopping five people) took us americans out. we had a delicious hong kong banquet, so i once again got to feast on delicious chinese food. i had forgotten everyone here speaks cantonese, so i felt bad about myself for not understanding anything. then i finally started talking in chinese (which they didn't initally understand, both because my mandarin sucks and because it's mandarin and they expected cantonese), and they "switched" to mandarin. it was a blast! i hope we get to have a lot more banquets while i'm here! (sidenote: apparently hangzhou is the paradise the chinese legend says... i've not seen it yet, but i've heard it's horribly polluted and highly industrial, even in the ritzier downtown areas. yuck. but i'm still excited to go!)