Clueless in China

One problem I keep running into here is that the restaurants, markets, cafes and snack shops don't work they way they do back home. It's rare to be able to just walk up to a counter, point at whatever looks good and hand over the cash. I never know how, where and when to order things （点菜，diǎncài） or pay for them （付钱，fùqián）. It's never as straightforward as it looks. I’ve been here over a month already and I still haven’t gotten used to it. In restaurants I never know whether there's table service or counter service and whether I have to pay before or after the meal. When buying food at a canteen or particular items at a store you might have to go to a cashier, tell them what you want to buy, pay for it and then bring the receipt back with you to get your stuff. Sometimes stores have separate tills for different products scattered through the store and you have to go hunting for the right one. Even buying bulk food at the market can be a challenge because you need to get it weighed and priced before you go to the cashier and you need to find the right station to get each item weighed. Sometimes when buying bulk you need to buy a certain amount - I'll start filling a bag with something and the staff will start jabbering at me in Chinese about weight and prices and I just get totally rattled and don’t know what to do. It's hard because my Chinese is really not strong enough for some of the complicated explanations I run into and I end up looking like an idiot a lot of the time.

But I'm gradually starting to figure out how to order in restaurants and cafes, or at least how to ask the staff where and how to pay. Today, for the first time since I arrived, I managed to go to the canteen (食堂, shítáng), order a meal and pay for it all by myself, with no help from a Chinese-speaking friend and no confusion or trouble at all. Well, they gave me hot soymilk when I specifically asked for cold, but it was still delicious, so whatever. For lunch I got the 4.9 Yuan combo with rice, crunchy stirfried lotus root (one of my new favourite veggies) and tomato fried eggs (番茄炒蛋, fānqié chǎodàn). Chinese tomato fried eggs are a super tasty dish that I can usually rely on as a vegetarian option when I eat out here. The ones I got at the canteen today were cold, clumsily made, and actually pretty terrible, but they tasted of sweet, sweet victory.

Chinese word of the day:
开心
Kāixīn
Happiness; to feel happy (lit. start/open heart)