China Revisited -- 2013 [#9]

The Store-Front Restaurant

From the Yuanshan Temple we drove a total of three minutes through the center of town to a restaurant. The street was narrow and clogged.  The storefront was already crowded with parked scooters, which had to be moved so that we could park. Two men attended to this task, one older than the other by a generation. The younger man moved the scooters, the older one kept him hopping. Some things are the same everywhere.

Edward's father had already arrived in his car and made arrangements both for parking and for lunch.

Through a store-front with an opening about the size of a double-car garage, we entered the restaurant. To the right were a few round tables and a staircase. To the left, the restaurant's menu, laid out like a buffet to display food choices -- some of it already cooked, but most of it raw.

Edward's father and mother had already made selections for our lunch; but if they hadn't or if we had come on our own, perish the thought, we would have been expected to choose from this array of options. Then, given our language skills, rather than bartering or negotiating menu and prices, we would have pointed and nodded and repeated "Xiexie" (thank you) optimistically.  Crude, I admit, but I am certain we would not have left hungry.

Just beyond the kitchen with its food display were three or four small round tables to the left, and a separate room to the right where we would be served.We were nearly always taken to a room out the main area, not so much to keep us hidden, which might have been a wise decision, as to follow the common practice in China. All of our restaurant meals were taken in rooms that were either private or semi-private.

In this as in many restaurants our eating space was simply an undecorated square room with a round table. For the sake of distinction, I will use the American term "family style" to describe these restaurants.

The little appliance in the corner behind Edward and Yujia is an air-conditioner, not a heater. This restaurant near the temple we had just visited, like most buildings in southern China, is not heated, and the front door -- in this case, a wide opening -- remains open during business hours, which may have been 16 or 18 hours every day.  Everyone wears a coat indoors.

For the sake of keeping our diet adventures up to date, I noted what we were served. The dish in front of Yujia is won-ton soup and the the dish on the lazy-susan is roasted peanuts. Sometimes these peanuts are boiled instead of roasted.  Either way, you pluck them one by one with your chopsticks, which I usually did straight-away to establish my chopsticks-cred.

We were served bitter melon soup with clams, oyster pancakes, pig stomach with almonds, broad flat noodles with bean sprouts, white fish with peppers and greens, fish dumplings, beef (in strips, of course) with green peppers, chicken soup with almonds and squid, and vegetable (swiss chard, I think).

A side note, as a reassurance of "freshness" we were told that the cow for our beef dish had been killed just the day before at 3 p.m. You have to admire that kind of precision, I think.

We were also told that the chicken for the chicken soup was killed just for us when Edward's father ordered the soup dish. Too much information, I suppose, for the average American restaurant goer. But a welcome bit of information nonetheless.

A further side note, this one in the faux pas (i.e., cultural blunder) department. The bowl is for eating and the little plate for bone, not the other way around.

When the dinner was done, one of the teenaged waitresses asked to have her picture taken with us.  So we posed with her while her friends recorded the moment on their little cameras.

I know it would be easy to over-imagine this moment of celebrity.  But as a story teller, I am interested in whether (or how) that moment plays out. This young waitress is, now, a small but important part of our stories of China.

I wonder how -- or if -- we figure into hers?

Busan Journal, Day 18

Busan's Lotte Giants

If Busan is to Seoul what Boston is New York, then a notion of Red Sox fandom will help you understand Major League Baseball in Busan.

We rode the subway down to Sakik Station.  As soon as we climbed to street level we knew we were in the right area.  Fans were heading toward the corner with a familiar determined stride, and the sidewalk vendors were setting up shop.  To the right at the first intersection, we could see the stadium looming above the other building about three blocks away.

I had written down the Hangul characters for stadium and tickets, words I thought I might need; the Hangul characters would help me recognize when they appeared.

Turns out I did not see any of the characters I had written down.  We followed the flow of fans until we found lines where we figured tickets were being sold.

Inside the park we were handed small orange blankets with GIANTS written on them. From the crush at the ticket window we had thought we were lucky to get in, but inside the stadium we were virtually alone.

As we had come when the box office opened thinking tickets might be hard to get, we had a lot of spare time before the game began.  We also had lots of room.  It looked like the stadium would remain nearly empty, but it began to fill rapidly just before the first pitch.

Side note here, almost exactly with the playing of the Korean national anthem, the sun disappeared behind the edge of the stadium and the wind picked up.  We cooled off rapidly.  Turns out the little orange blankets were handed out to be useful, not to wave.  We were quite surprised also that a good number of fan ignored the playing of the anthem; they neither stood with the rest or us nor stopped whatever they had been doing.

I will not reprise the game itself except to say that it was very good baseball.  If I may offer a fairly commonplace comment here, the interesting part of attending the game was the atmosphere.  Lotte Giant Nation, perhaps. As with all serious sports enterprises there are traditions and routines at Sajik Stadium that real fans learn and participate in.

The man who sat behind me handed me a section of his newspaper before the game started.  The paper was for making a pom-pom.  After watching others fold, tear and roll pom-poms from their newspapers, I began to make one too.  But apparently I was working too slowly and carefully because the girl across the aisle took the paper from me and finished it, quickly and efficiently.

I dutifully shook the pom-pom at appropriate times to the songs everyone sang together.  It was fun to be part of the group even if I didn't know the words or, too often, what brought on the singing.

Did I mention that one of the goup activities was drinking?  The guys next to us had brought in a backpack full of beer and soju, a colorless liquor like vodka.  Like many others they methodically worked their way through the bottles from the backpack.

More interesting to us were the snack items.  I took a lot of pictures of these snacks but nearly all of them are blurred because the vendors, mostly older women, moved too fast!

You may recognize those wavy things poking out of the bag.  Yes, tentacles.  Dry, salty squid.  A big seller.  Now you don't find that at Fenway.

There were other interesting features to the atmosphere of baseball in Busan.  There was the fifth inning kissing couples televised on the jumbotron.  I was ready to spring into action, but the TV cameras focused exclusively on the other side of the field.

There were two pudgy mascots who popped off their oversized heads at one point to do some serious break dancing on top of the home team dugout.

Then there were the cheerleaders in tiny uniforms led by a cheerleading gymnast who strutted and pranced and orchestrated like a Korean Mick Jagger.

During the 7th inning, instead of singing "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" orange plastic Lotte Mart bags began to make the rounds.  Lotte is the retail giant that owns the team, so naturally their bags appear.  The objective here is to make a balloon of the bag by capturing air in it, then tying it to your head by hooking the handles over your ears.

It should look something like this bag on the head of our neighbor who was mentioned earlier as having the booze laden backpack. 

I, too, grabbed some orange bags and tied one on.  Sadly, I do not have any clear pictures of my head balloom to share. But I can attest that the handles do put serious strain on the ears.

By this time, we were just about frozen, having come illprepared for the drop in temperature and the wind chill.  So at the end of the eighth inning, our team behind by a run, we left for the subway.

For the record, we are planning to return for another game, although it may be true that we are just fair weather fans.