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The other night, my co-worker Adam and I decided to hit the streets of Chungli in search of something differnt than the usual Cantonese and Taiwanese food we had been having most of the past week. We spied a little restaurant off of a side street that looked appetizing, so we decided to go for it.

We were greeted with a hearty "Ni Hao" (hello), to which we replied "Ni Hao" back. We were immediately shown to a table and handed two menus. Issue number 1. We don't speak Mandarin, and no one at the restaurant spoke English. No problem, we've gotten by as some places have English menus, while others have pictures, or plasticized models of the various dishes. Problem 2, Shu Shan Chuan had neither. Our menu was entirely in Chinese, and there were no pictures to be found. Problem 3, we didn't bring a phrase book with us, so our communication was limited to a few key words: Hello, how are you, thank you, beer, numbers 0-10, etc.

With this in mind, imagine the scene that unfolded when our waiter approached and started asking us what we wanted in Chinese, and all we could do was look at him, smile a lot, and laugh. Then he laughed. Then we laughed again too. Before you knew it, we were all laughing and smiling, and it was just plain silly. In the end, we just sort of shrugged our shoulders, pointed at the menu, and pointed back at the waiter and made a gesture that we hoped translated to "please sir, we have no idea what we're doing here. Please choose something both tasty and nutritious for us to eat this evening". We could tell that the place served hot pots, so we hoped that was what we had just ordered.

It must have worked, because a few minutes later, a woman showed up at our table with a huge bowl with two types of broth in it. She placed it on a burner in the middle of the table and brought it to a boil. Meanwhile, other people started showing up at the table with plates containing all sorts of items for us to add to the pot. We had lettuce leaves, bok choy, mushrooms, lamb, thin sliced beef, dumplings, tofu, some sort of thing that looked like tofu, but was made from blood, and several other items that I couldn't identify. Someone else motioned us over to a little stand behind our table where about two dozen different pots and dishes were setup. The grabbed us an empty bowl and began mixing items from the pots and dishes - obviously mixing up a dipping sauce. We were handed the completed sauce and encouraged to go ahead and make our own. It was fun, even though I was only able to identify about half of the ingredients by sight.

The food itself turned out to be really good. Sometimes, it was a little messy to eat, but we really enjoyed the cook it yourself experience with ingredients we weren't normally used to working with.

As one friend suggested, next time we are in a situation where we can't easily communicate what we want to eat, we should try to act it out using charades. Given how our first experience went, I think it might actually be fun(ny) to give this a try sometime.