Pictionary

My sister is currently in Paris and she just reminded me of one of my favorite things about navigating in foreign countries: their signs. We are so used to our own road signs and directional signs in buildings that it is surprising that other people have had different ideas of how to show people around. The following are some of my favorites, feel free to add your own interpretations of what these signs mean:

don’t feed the walrus

why did the penguin cross the road?

“no tromboning in the street”

don’t lean on a friend

don’t travel with giraffes

hard to see but it looks like another don’t drink and drive version

“dont play your flute into your phone”

“don’t drink and drive”

found on a wall in a school

“dig for burried treasure”

fans so strong they make men and women fly?

bathroom? that little girl has to pee I think

Soda Cans

pull tab top can

Sometimes when you travel it can be quite surprising what you find that is different. For example: soda. Everywhere I’ve been has Pepsi and Coke. (I haven’t seen root beer in France yet and every time we’ve tried to get a French cousin to try it here they tell us it takes like toilet water…though perhaps they mean eau de toilette which is perfume…). Anyway, the brands are the same but the packaging is different. I’ve seen actual glass bottles which our adds on TV have in other countries but I don’t tend to find coke bottles in the US  (though they are much cuter than cans). In China the cans are pull tabs instead of flip tabs to open them. But since they look so similar I was snapping off lids everywhere trying to flip them. One of my friends had the unfortunate task of trying to open a can I had already snapped the tab off of when he sliced his finger-oops. It wasn’t until this can of Pepsi over halfway through my visit that I noticed the tabs had to be pulled-it’s amazing how instinctual snapping open a can can be.

Taste This

Since I complained in my last post about pictures not having taste I thought I should write a little bit about tasting other countries. The first time I had sushi was in Rome. And the first time I had Kentucky Fried Chicken was in the Beijing airport. I’ve eaten Subway now in both South Africa and in China. And I’ve had to pay for ketchup and mustard at McDonald’s in Italy. All of these food anomalies aren’t because I don’t like trying foreign foods in other counties. I actually love trying new foods (and if you think about it since I had never had sushi or KFC before I was actually really excited to try them for the first time-probably more so the sushi than the KFC…).

I think part of the reason I end up trying non “traditional” cuisine in addition to “traditional” cuisine in foreign countries is that it can be daunting trying to figure out a foreign menu. One of my favorite meals in China was in Beijing where we went to a restaurant that did not have a menu in English. It was a little after lunch time so there were only one or maybe two other groups eating there. We looked around for another place to eat, but the food on the other patrons’ plates at that restaurant looked too delicious to resist. So the helpful staff allowed us to order by pointing to other peoples’ plates and bringing out some things based on our previous choices. This was my first taste of Chinese food (the night before had been some sort of pizza buffet with the grossest tasting soft serve ice cream I have ever had) and I loved it.

But finding a place that is willing to put up with foreigners trying to decipher the menu is not always easy. My roommate and my first night in Rome ended with both of us in tears after trying to order a pizza. We were deposited at our host family’s house around 5 or 6pm after traveling all day and we hadn’t learned yet that Italians tend to eat around 9 or 10pm. So we were unaware that our host lady was going to offer us a nice dinner around 9:30pm. So we decided to go out on our own. The professors managing our trip had given us our weekly allowance but they had only given us bills in 20 euro increments. When our pizza was rung up it only cost about 3 euros each and some odd change. When we tried to give our 20 euro bill the woman refused it (We later realized that Italians expect exact or close to exact change when making purchases). We didn’t know any Italian yet so we did not quite understand the problem nor did we have any bills smaller than a 20. The woman kept shouting stuff at us in Italian and we kept trying to hand her our bill until she finally took it and gave us back non-exact change (though i think the error was in our favor) and told us to leave.

It also can be hard to know what kind of food you are actually getting. When I was in both Italy and Brazil the idea of being a vegetarian was not very well understood. In Italy my vegetarian friends in my tour group were served chicken soup with chicken cubes floating in it instead of pasta with meat sauce. In Brazil meat seemed to be implied even when not listed on the menu. One time I ordered what was advertised as a 4 cheese calzone which when it arrived had ham chunks in it. And another time I ordered what I thought looked like a fruit pastry only to bite in and realize it was filled with red sauce and meatballs-not the breakfast I was expecting.

Sometimes it’s interesting to try food you think you recognize in another country. For example my cousin and I are obsessed with the Lipton Peach Ice Tea found in every other country I’ve been to besides the US. I don’t know what makes it taste so good, but it is different than any I’ve tried here (but don’t drink it before a long car ride or you will for sure need to make a stop). Also Nestle makes different treats in other countries too.

I think part of the reason I’ve been drawn to these unusual food choices is homesickness and a need for comfort food, either on my part or on the part of my travel companions. In Italy my study abroad group went for sushi because we were searching for something other than pasta or pizza for dinner. We also went to the Hard Rock Cafe for a taste of home. (I preferred the sushi much more than hanging around with a bunch of drunk American tourists…) My professor’s daughter in Italy confessed to me that after spending the summer in Italy she and her family go to Burger King’s immediately after going home just because they haven’t had it in so long. In China my friend Lee wanted to try different restaurants when we were visiting Beijing because where he had been living in Wuhan did not have the same international restaurant scene available. And as for the fast food, well some of that is just based on convenience and recognition. I know I would be disappointed if I went abroad and the food didn’t taste any different than it does here, but on the other hand I really wish I could find some of those treats here!

I have tried some interesting local food too:

-duck heart in China (but not duck head because the people who were living in China didn’t even recommend it),

-squid a few times, gelati almost daily and I made a quest to try every type of coffee I could find in Italy,

-deer probably killed that weekend in France, unidentified seafood on the coast, and I’ve been known to stand drooling in the cheese aisle in a French grocery store,

-meat that torchlight made impossible to identify on safari and cake and custard for every dessert in South Africa

-and unidentified meat on a stick while in Brazil

Delicious dumpling

The famous cake and custard dessert in South Africa

Chinese Mexican dinner-much better than the watery margarita

Don’t let the bed bugs bite?

When I got bit by the travel bug I didn’t know it would leave a welt. An unfortunate trend I’ve noticed when traveling is getting bit, and as I’ve said before I don’t react well to buzzing in my ears (or ringing for that matter). Almost a decade of showing up to my older sister’s birthday parties with one eye swollen shut  from a run in with a black fly or mosquito has left me quite paranoid about bites.

In Brazil one of my friends came to my room in a panic because he’d seen a lizard in his room. A lizard actually probably was a good thing because he was hopefully eating the bugs in the room. Maybe I’ll start traveling with a lizard. Another one of my friends was bit by some unknown bug which resulted in black and blue welts all over her legs.

In Italy my sister and I laid an elaborate ambush for a mosquito. The start of the problem was that the window to our hotel room had been left open. I’ve learned the hard way that most other countries don’t have screens the way we do in America. Just the other day a cousin of mine from France was lamenting all of the screen things in the window because he didn’t have the freedom to chuck things out the window. Since I was unaware of this convenience of chucking things out of windows and more concerned about what was climbing in the windows I have always been careful to restrict air circulation to a minimum when staying in screen-less accommodations. Therefore when my sister and I returned to our hotel room and found the window left open I knew we were in for trouble. Shortly after laying down I heard the tell-tale buzz in my ear. I knew there was no way I would sleep with that buzzing noise going on. Since my sister also heard the buzzing noise I knew I had her on my side. The two of us set up our trap in the bathroom. We shut off all other lights but the bathroom light and left the door open a crack so the mosquito would have to come through the tiny crack to get to us. I was perched on the bidet and my sister was probably perched on the sink as we sat in wait. The little buzzer never saw it coming.

While on safari in South Africa I knew bugs would be an issue. And of course this time there was malaria to contend with as well. I had enough bug spray on to keep a small elephant away, but nothing could change the fact that we were staying in a bungalow that 1000 different species of bugs called home. I barely slept all night listening to the rustlings in the thatch roof. And I certainly didn’t eat anything since I could tell even in the firelight that my dinner was crawling.

Most recently in China I again had the problem of bugs to deal with. The first night sleeping at my friend’s apartment his sister and I awoke with bites all over our faces and arms-basically anything that had been exposed while sleeping. Since it was just the areas exposed I dismissed the possibility of bed bugs (we had been staying at a hostel the weekend before, a good place to pick up bed bugs I’ve heard). And since there were more than enough mosquitoes flying around the room to share I assumed that must be it. I resorted to sleeping with my ipod in my ears to drown out the buzzing and a sweater over my face with just a tiny air hole to breath out of and sacrificed my arms to the bugs since it was too hot to be fully covered. I didn’t think I’d have any luck getting my friend and his sister to stage a trap in the bathroom for multiple reasons: a) there were too many mosquitoes, b) the bathroom was too tiny for us all to fit there, and c) as I’ve already mentioned I had destroyed the bathroom. When I returned home looking like I had chicken poxes my mom panicked and threw all of my stuff in the freezer which is apparently how you get rid of bed bugs. Luckily no more bites occurred once I was home and I still don’t think they were actually bed bugs.

Tonight’s special: a Chinese lesson

*The following was written shortly after my arrival in Wuhan China

We are in Wuhan now where Lee has been living and teaching English for the year. So far I have almost set fire to the apartment with a hair dryer and shattered one of the only sit down toilets in all of china just by sitting on it. The kids in Lee’s class laugh at how tall I am and Lee’s sister and I have changed from “Sarah and Katy” to “Carol and Sadie”, though I might have been “Shirley” this morning. Today I got my hair done at school. When we were sitting in the office this math teacher was braiding one of the other teacher’s hair. So Lee asked her to do my hair, and she didn’t really hesitate at all, just sort of laughed and got to work. Like there was nothing odd about foreign strangers asking her to braid their hair. 

 

The other night we went for dinner at a teacher’s house from Lee’s school. Turns out by dinner we actually were getting a strict introductory Mandarin lesson. Now I’m all for Mandarin lessons, just surprise ones when I’m expecting food are a little awkward. We almost had brought beer to go with dinner but Colette (another American teaching English at the school) said our host had said we needn’t bring anything (that should have been our first clue). I’m not sure on what bringing beer to a Mandarin lesson would look like. We didn’t realize our mistake right away, it all sort of happened gradually. First we went over and our host Alice offered us bananas, tomatoes and orange juice. Luckily I ate the banana since that was the only dinner I was going to get… I thought we were waiting for her husband, who does the cooking, to come home, but then she mentioned something about him not coming home till 9:00 “and you know I don’t cook”. That was a red light right there. But I was still thinking for a bit that perhaps we were having a late dinner, or perhaps she meant tomorrow night he was coming home at 9:00 since her tenses weren’t always accurate. Then her in-laws arrived and set up a circle around us and passed out the lesson paper. Still I was thinking this was just for fun to look at while we waited for dinner. In her nervousness Alice spilled tea all over me as she tried to pass it to her mother in law. I wondered why she was so nervous for dinner. Apparently her mother in law is from Beijing and speaks with precise Mandarin-hence her teaching the lesson. The father in-law disappeared and for a while we were hoping he was making us dinner. The lesson was interesting. If I watched the mother’s mouth and mimicked it I could do decent at repeating the sounds, however I couldn’t remember what sound went with what letter. The lesson was two hours long. Which wasn’t bad; though my head was starting to spin trying to remember things and understand of which I could do neither, and of course it was now two hours later than we thought we were having dinner. Alice kept saying how we should practice and that we should go around and ask people words. I didn’t know if she meant right then or in the future-how long was this lesson going to last? Alice and her mom said that Lee was clever, but bad at tones, Colette did pretty well, Katy was afraid to try and that I had “a thick voice that sounded musical”. I don’t really like the sound of “thick” but she seemed to mean it as a compliment. She also said “my mother says you are doing just ok!” Which doesn’t really sound good, but her voice sounded positive so we think her “just” was kind of like “just swell!” or “just fine!” and “ok” wasn’t meant as mediocre. But maybe she did mean it was only ok and said it so positively to temper the blow. Finally at 9:00 the in-laws took there leave. We’d finally given up hope on dinner by then, however I was still hoping the husband would come home and say “Hey did you guys eat? Let’s order a pizza!”  I do wonder if at any point they realized that we hadn’t known what we were getting into. Did our stomachs growl loudly and signal our hunger? Did our nervous laughter and whispers of “do you think we’re getting food?” clue them in? Perhaps they had expected something different from the lesson too. Maybe they were expecting us to come with primers and pencils. Or maybe we were supposed to have dinner and we were supposed to have picked up a pizza on the way. Perhaps they weren’t teaching us Chinese, just repeating slowly and enunciating “Where is the pizza you crazy kids?”