Eating out - cracking the code

I worked with a Russian guy back in the States who upon learning about my move commented regarding the language barrier, that my survival skills would kick in and the first situation I would be forced to resolve, be it verbally or non-verbally, is finding food. It can be intimidating and the problem here is pointing is risky, as you often cannot tell what something is.

Cooking for yourself is easier. Yeah, there are some meat looking products at the store that are hard to identify, but you can make your way through it. I'm not really well equipped to cook in this hotel-style apartment with a small kitchen and I haven't even had my Slap Chop shipped from home, yet. So I have been trying to eat out in between cooking up some ramen.

On the way back from the MRT the other day I noticed a restaurant that had some dishes on a shelf looking like you could just pick whatever you want so I thought that would be a good spot to try, knowing that I am not in a touristy area and English menus are hard to come by. I walked over to the place after work. Most of the restaurants here would be perceived as quite "sketchy" back in the states just based on appearance and cleanliness. You quickly get over that here, otherwise, you will starve to death.

There are 3 odors I find prevalent in Taipei:

1. Carbon monoxide fumes
2. Smell of food cooking at the street side carts - part soy sauce smell, part cooking oil smell
3. Rotting corpse

They eat something called "stinky tofu", the likes of which I haven't tried yet. I am told that stinky tofu is the source of the rotting corpse smell. I still haven't accepted that someone will stick that in their mouth and there is not, in fact, a rotting corpse nearby.

Luckily, the little restaurant by me does not smell like rotting corpse so I slipped in and took a seat. The mama-san came by and gave me a slip of paper on a clipboard with a pen. It was much like the menu at a sushi bar when they hand you a pencil and have you fill it out yourself, except that it was all in Chinese. If you're not familiar with Chinese, there is the traditional written language with fancy characters, aka "kanji". Then there is a version which is "romanized" or translated into what to us is normal letters, this is known as pin yin. Unfortunately for us Westerners, it is not widely used which makes it much more difficult to get your grips on the language. If you take any Spanish/French/Italian class, you can get through menus in much of Europe, or you can at least re-recognize a word once you've figured out what it means. Even in Dutch and German, once I order it, I can later recall the word even though it isn't a romance language.

So when they says, "it's Chinese to me", that's how I felt looking at this menu that was meaningless, except I could make out what the prices are because they use Arabic numbers. There was a dotted line separating the top section from the bottom section and the prices on the top were less than the bottom. I figured the top might be appetizers and the bottom, main dishes. I also looked at the prices and know that a meal in this place can run about $4 per person so I decided to pick the first item from "column A" and the first from "column B". They added up to four bucks so I was hoping that was the correct quantity of food.

The items on the shelf appear to be cold side dishes and I saw some people grab them on the way in. There was also a self-serve drink cooler with some soda, beer and bottled water and tea. Nobody here appears to drink anything. I think that is because bottled beverages are relatively expensive, compared to the food.

In only a few minutes mama-san brought me a scallion pancake and a combo fried rice. Score! Scallion pancake is awesome and I don't know that I've ever had it outside of Taiwan. I thought about grabbing one of the items off the shelf but this ended up being the perfect amount of food. So now that I love the food at this place, I'm figuring out a plan to decipher the menu. 

I'm not sure the mama-san will let me take the ordering paper home as it has a carbon copy backing and she saves them all and I don't want to break any of the rules and get blacklisted. Now that I know what item #1 from each column are, I will likely venture to item #2. I'll bring a pen and paper and start redrawing the menu and translate as I order each item. I wonder if I will be able to get through the entire menu in 3 weeks. I feel like I'm trying to crack Kryptos.

I left this place with a real sense of accomplishment. Especially since the food was so good, and cheap. At the end of the meal, mama-san was asking me a question while pointing at the bill, first item 1, then item 2. I thought she was trying to say the amount of money I gave her didn't cover both but after she returned my change, I determined she was asking which I liked better.

I subsequently added "han hou che" to my vocab which I could have said, meaning "very good eat" and is something common to say in approval of the meal. I'll use that next time so she doesn't think my opinion was so-so, quite the contrary.