The Hotpot Incident

Having wasted most of our second day in China due to the antics of the night before, we decided to head out that night to try our first taste of authentic Chinese cuisine. Wandering aimlessly around the vicinity of the hostel, we ended up in the first place we saw that didn't look too expensive, but didn't look too dodgy hygiene wise either.

As soon as we entered the door heads turned, but we were used to that from India. What we weren't used to was the massive language barrier we now faced. No one in the restaurant had a word of English, and likewise none of us have a word of Mandarin, a fact that triggered incredulous laughter from the staff when they realised.



A paper menu with just Mandarin and checkboxes was placed in front of us. We were preparing to just pick things at random, when the waitress grabbed my Mandarin phrasebook (god bless it) off me. She then showed extremely commendable patience in going through the menu reader section, pointing out things to us which were on the menu, at which point we'd nod and smile or shake our heads. It was a slow ordering system, but it worked.



Sichuan province is famous throughout China (and the world they claim) for it's fiery cuisine, and the most famous Sichuan cuisine of all is huguo, or hotpot. This dining experience involves a big gas-heated cooking pot in the middle of the table, which is filled with a cooking oil of your choice (and plenty of hot chillies) and then into which you place your food to cook it. We had unwittingly walked into a hotpot restaurant, which I slowly realised as I watched our waitress pour in the oil and turn on the gas.



Relieved that we had overcome the initial ordering challenge, we now got ready for the next one: chopsticks. John and I had never used them before, ever, and Gearóid's experience was limited at best. After our first batch of food had stewed over in the pot long enough, we tried to retrieve it, with huge difficulty. Still hungover from the night before, my brain was wondering what the hell was going on. It felt so alien, eating with them. Still, we all just about managed, though there was some mess on the table towards the end of the meal.

Feeling proud of myself that I had almost survived my first restaurant experience in China, and hotpot at that, I gleefully picked away at what was left over in the pot. Accidentally eating one of the red hot chillies, I instinctively grabbed some of the lettuce that was still sitting on the tray of ordered food by our table to cool my mouth down.

After a bad night's sleep due to an uncomfortable feeling in my stomach, the next morning I had to pull out of the trip to the Panda Breeding Centre – I was bound to the toilet for the second time on this trip. The moral of the story is: when having hotpot, absolutely everything must be cooked in the pot – even the fucking lettuce.