Hot Pot & A Bowl of Ice

It is the equivalent of ordering a pizza with no dough, but we'll get to that later...

It was our first day in Shanghai without our trusted guides and hosts, Andrew and Becky. But no worries, we had spent an entire ten minutes learning how to order our favourite dishes in Chinese, how to order a glass of cold water, and standard issue side dishes like fried rice or vegetables. We were armed and ready.

We had been walking for a few hours and had already successfully ordered "dumplings to go" at a street food stall. Apparently, Chinese is not such a difficult language to learn and can be mastered in only a day.

We later stumbled upon a quaint courtyard in a sea of storefront clothing and furniture stores and decided to stop for lunch in the restaurant within it. We were not completely certain it wasn't a tea house, as the only english sign said "Tea Hot Pot". We very elequently asked whether they were serving lunch my using hand signals and inquiring: "Food? Food?". We were led to a private booth, still not completely confident that they served anything but tea.

We were shown a menu with food items written both in Chinese and English, and non-exhorbitant prices so we decided to order. We pointed to a beef dish, spring rolls and shrimp dumplings. The waitress pointed to soup options, but we opted out. It was an extremely hot and humid day, so hot soup did not seem like a refreshing option. She continued to point to various items on the menu, but we refused, as a beef dish and a couple of appetizers to share should be adequate, and we were not going to be up-sold. She seemed unsatisfied with our choices, but left the table, smiling and nodding.

She returned a few minutes later with another waitress and two burners. We signed to her that we would be sharing one, and she again pointed to the menu, asking if we wanted any additional items. We began refusing again, but she repeatedly pointed to the soup section, saying "Hot pot. Hot Pot".

The fog lifted and we realized that what she was trying to tell us was that a hot pot is exactly that. A fondue/Korean barbeque of sorts, where the ingredients you order (or singular ingredient in our case, as all we had ordered was beef) are added to a hot pot at your table and cooked in the soup base of your choice. Laughing, we pointed to chicken soup and she seemed relieved that we finally understood the concept. In essence, we had been trying to order pizza with no dough.

We added noodles and collected a few dipping sauces, finally understanding how ridiculous our order must have seemed. I won't embarrass ourselves any further by recounting how we ordered ice water and received a bowl of ice. Delivered again by our waitres while smiling and nodding.

The moral of this story? Chinese is a difficult languange to learn and cannot be mastered in a single lesson. Even if you believe you have mastered a few phrases, attempts to use them will be met with a myriad of responses from giggles to looks of bewilderment.