Ni Hao!

When you are in a foreign country, where you do not know the language, you discover things that cannot find back at home. I have discovered in China the three dimensions of a restaurant menu card.

The Chinese food is very cheap. Yesterday, I paid 30 cents of a Euro at the cantina of the university where I have already been for two weeks. Today, I paid 2,5 Euro at a very nice restaurant. However, it is not always easy to order what you really wish. Today for example, we have tried to order four chicken brochettes at the same time as tried to practice the numbers in mandarin. For our surprise, only one brochette arrived to the table…

The word “menu”, by the way very useful word as it is very similar to the mandarin expression of “beautiful girl”… has different formats depending the place where you are. If you are in a local restaurant, the menu will be only in mandarin (dimension 1). If you are in a restaurant where foreigners go as well, the menu will also be in English (dimension 2). Then, there are other restaurants which think on everyone and have the menu with pictures of the different plates (dimension 3 – international language).

The graphic dimension is very practical and although very often it is associated to typical restaurants for foreigners, it is really useful for me now. This dimension can also be fun, last weekend I played to try to guess countries by doing gestures about typical places from those countries (guess what the gesture was when Spain had to be guessed…) and I enjoyed it very much.

I think in the future I am going to give it more importance to the graphical dimension. In the mean while I will continuous learning mandarin characters which I will have to study now as I am having tomorrow my weekly exam. May be in few months I will manage to order what I want in a Chinese restaurant where only mandarin characters are on the menu…