Chinese Takeout

Nancy offered to help us order dinner at a restaurant located just behind our hotel. We were pretty beat and asked if we could just get everything in to go boxes so we could eat in our hotel room. Now, odd as it sounds, takeout orders at this restaurant are apparently not the norm. I thought we’d be OK after Nancy left, but the food did not come out all at once and when it did it was on plates. This created an interesting situation. Our server spoke no English and other than counting, I only know a few phrases in Chinese. I was pretty sure stuff like “I love you” and “little treasure” probably weren’t going to get us what we needed. She was really sweet and I managed to “explain”…well, gesture…that we needed to have the food in takeout boxes. That seemed to go well until the last couple of dishes came out. Both were noodle dishes that had a fair amount of liquid, which required plastic tubs instead of the usual foam containers. Our server tried to ask us a question about what we wanted done. All I could gather from her was something about a “one”. One what I had no idea, so she wrote it down on the back of our receipt…in Chinese.  In desperation she called over another server and I was able to gather from her that the “one” was a one yuan charge (about 17 cents) for each plastic tub. I agreed and Chinese takeout was back on track.

By this time Jerri and the girls had set out with the food that had already arrived and started to walk back to our hotel. Initially that didn’t seem to be a big deal since we were right behind it and Nancy had left instructions how to get to the gated entrance. As I left with the last few items and headed around the corner of the hotel I met them coming back the other way. The road they’d gone down was a dead end, so we started off in the opposite direction. We finally ended up back in our room with about four times as much Chinese food as we could possibly eat. Some things are universal.