Thursday, April 17, 2008

Food lost in Translation

The school canteen has had the menus translated into English. I am trying to learn the characters so for a while I forced myself to order only what I could read. A couple of times I could say the characters but had no idea what the grouping of them actually meant so the dish was a surprise. I have looked at the English menu from time to time. One of the windows had all their dishes translated in an interesting way -- the food is now explosive:

"Beef explodes the vegetables"
"Bamboos explodes the pork"
Etc.

The potentially most disturbing dish was:
"Rape explodes the Chicken."

They meant "rape seed leaves" from what I could gather from the characters.

The canteen food is actually quite good. For all of about $1.50 you can get a pretty good dish of food, bowl of rice, and a 40 oz. beer. Beer is cheaper than water -- $0.30 for a 40 oz of beer; $0.40 for 16 oz. water. Although if you get a group of friends together, you can go to one of the better restaurants in the school and get a dish per person for about $2 (unless the stupid dollar drops even further).

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