Jun. 27, 2007 - Culture Shock Lunch

Number One Son skyped us a report of his lunch today.  It's so illustrative of the differences in our cultures, we thought you'd enjoy eavesdropping a bit:

Well, back from lunch. Guess it's going to be hard day--even lunch was weird. I went across the street to my favorite source for fried rice, but they were full up, and people were standing around. I went down the street to a number of other restaurants: the Special Way Europe Topic restaurant, the cheap Japanese, the C....se version of K&W (I think), the spicy soup+other things restaurant, and a couple of others.

Nothing sounded good, not even pizza, so I finally decided, well, I can say egg fried rice, so I can get that at about any C...se restaurant. So I went into a small middle-level restaurant that "the Intern" and I had been to once and looked around. The proprietress (no uniform, looked like she was in charge, and twice as busy as anyone else) quickly seated me across a table from a young woman eating alone. That threw me for a loop, but then I remembered that this was the place were people like living where they can see into their neighbor's living room from their kitchen window, and they feel just fine being crammed 120 to a subway car. They have perfected the art of mentally placing yourself in an empty room.

So I just sat down, ordered my egg fried rice (good) and my beef noodles (not so good) and ate them. The young lady looked at me about as much as I looked at her--that is, not when I could avoid it. So this is how I ended up eating lunch with somebody that I didn't know and couldn't even give you a description of! I figured for a people that really love a crowd, there's no real reason you should let a seat at a table go to waste if you're eating alone.  So I'm fine--just suffering a little culture shock

Jun. 28, 2007 - Love the blog!