** Adoption countdown: 6 days until Pam, Terry and Matthew return home **
GUANGZHOU, China (Friday, Dec. 12, 2008, 10:45 p.m.) – Whenever I stumbled on a new dish as a child and wanted to know what it was like – frog legs quickly comes to mind as a good example – I would hear “Oh, it tastes just like chicken.”
And for someone who loves chicken (I can eat chicken seven days a week), telling him that another dish tastes like chicken is more than faint praise.
So there we were, Pam, Matthew and I, sitting down for dinner at the Chinese restaurant about a block away from our room at the White Swan Hotel. We tried feverishly to communicate with a staff that spoke perfect Mandarin.
After a few minutes, the manager, who spoke perfect English, stopped by our table, handed us menus with large photos of every dish and listened as I placed our order.
“This is what we want,” I said, pointing to a full-color photo in the menu of roasted pigeon, priced at the equivalent of about $4 each. “We were here three years ago and loved the food. We want to try this.”
“OK,” the man said.
“So, what’s it taste like?” I asked.
The man looked confused.
“I mean, does it taste like chicken?” I asked
“No,” he said. “It tastes like pigeon.”
“I mean, does it taste like chicken? You know, like chicken? Or how about duck? Does it taste like duck?” I asked.
“Um, it tastes like pigeon.”
“Oh,” I said, pausing as I decided whether to go forward and order pigeon. What the hell, I thought. “Well, we want two of those, one for me and one for my wife.”
We also ordered fried noodles with vegetables, steamed seasoned broccoli, a huge bowl of congee for Matthew and fried sweet potato balls. We learned later they were out of sweet potato balls, an indication they were popular (do they taste like chicken, I wondered). Dinner cost us less than $20.
A few minutes after I ordered, our first dish arrived: Two, piping hot, roasted pigeons. As soon as I pulled out my camera, the English-speaking manager suddenly appeared from nowhere. He looked puzzled as I snapped a photo of the roasted pigeons.
“Goofy Americans,” I muttered to him and smiled awkwardly.
Then Pam and I quickly took a bite, chewing away at a sweet-tasting meat that had the consistency of dark-meat chicken. I was a little greasy, a little fatty and full of bones.
And no: It didn’t taste like chicken. It tasted exactly like pigeon.
Matthew had nothing to do with the roasted pigeon. Our son was a combination of wired and tired after a full day of traveling from Zhengzhou.
He was more interested in screaming as loudly as possible (in an otherwise quiet restaurant), playing with his chopsticks and throwing things on the floor. Once Pam and I finished our roasted pigeons, Matthew, of course, wanted to play with the pigeon heads.
Matthew’s protests didn’t last, though, because we politely paid our bill, complimented the manager on the food, told him we will return and said we loved the pigeon.
He smiled: “That’s our specialty.”
Copyright 2008 by Terry R. Cassreino. All rights reserved.
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