How Do You Eat It

It was late Friday afternoon and we decided to take the ferry across the river to Hankou. The ferry landing at the end of our street was closed for some reason, but the ferry was working out of a landing a short ways upstream. I also noticed that the river was much higher than normal and much swifter. With the faster current it took about ten minutes to go down stream and cross over to the other landing. We get off and walk to the business walk and walked a ways down it and then turned to our left down a very long row of seafood restaurants. We stopped at several along the way to check on certain things to find just the right place. Soon we found it, took our seat, placed our order, and paid for it. In just a few minutes a burner was placed on our table and in just a few more minutes a pan of seafood was placed on the burner to keep it hot.

As I looked at the food in the picture above, the first question was, “How do you eat this?” I didn’t think about how it would taste or what I was eating as I have learned from experience not to even think about those questions because if you do you are sure to miss a wonderful eating experience; like we were about to enjoy tonight.

I was shown how to eat each different kind of sea food and with a little practice I did ok and as expected the taste was great. It was an eating experience I could easily repeat. As we were working our way through the food in front of us, a pot of very hot thick rice soup was placed on the table. It took awhile for it to cool down to where I could eat it. For the Chinese they are able eat and drink things that I can’t even touch. I am finding that the longer I eat and drink hot things, the more tolerant I am becoming.

We had finished the seafood in front of us and were on the last portion of the rice soup and another big plate of seafood arrived; a plate of clams. I noticed that some people were putting the side of the clam shell that the insides were stuck to in their mouth and with their tongue peel off the soft part and eat it and spit out the shell; don’t do it the other way around. We took the approach of holding the half containing the insides with our left hand and then using our chopsticks pick out the insides in one piece.

We polished off the clams and headed back to catch the ferry, but unfortunately we were about 30 seconds too slow and had to wait 30 minutes for the next one. It finally arrived and we got home about three and one half hours after we left. It was a very nice evening together over a nice meal.