Ode to Hiram (a little late)

On my drive home from work today, I was thinking of some things I had intended to post about our trip to China that I never did. So, here it is.


While we were at the Forbidden City our tour guide, Hiram, was trying to explain what the huge bowl-like stone structures were for. (You can see one on the ground level near the bottom of the steps. I was only slightly taller than them. They were big.) We helped him come up with the word "vat" and then just played completely dumb. He couldn't stop laughing enough to actually tell us what they were for. We said something like, "They ate soup out of that?. . . No? Oh. . .They took baths in there?. . ." Finally he said it was for putting out fires, and I commented on how hard it would be to carry that up the stairs. (Apparently, they used buckets to carry the water that was stored in the vats.) We had fun trying to make Hiram laugh. To be honest, I was rather amused too.

After we were up the to the Great Wall and back, we had a meal at a local restaurant. They were not used to foreigners - we caught the cooks watching us eat. This was the first meal we had with Hiram. The meal was "Hot Pot" - Hiram's favorite. This is like a soup that the whole table shares. They boil a fish (head and all) in spices and then bring raw beef, cabbage, noodles. . . for you to dump in as you see fit. The table has a hole in the middle of it and a burner underneath, so it cooks while at your table. Now, I must admit there are certain foods that I ate while carefully inspecting - hopefully somwhat inconspicuously (such as the fish, because there were bones it) Other foods were "safe" because I could eat them without really paying attention to them. Vegetables, rice, noodles. . .fell into this category. (Does being a math person have anything to do with my desire to sort things into categories?) That is, until the tomato noodle entered my world. This noodle is made of tomato flour. It is white and rouhgly half an inch think, an inch wide and 2 feet long. I took one of the noodles out of the pot, thankful that I had something of good volume to eat. I don't know what I expected, but this was shocking to me. It was chewy, sort of like a gummy bear. It didn't taste bad; it didn't taste like much at all. But it was so chewy. This was our first meal with Hiram and our driver. I wanted to be polite. I wanted to bite part of it off, but it was too chewy to bite through, so I just kept pulling it into my mouth. It was so much chewy stuff in my mouth at once. I think I chewed for the next 5 minutes. Although not a terribly exotic food, it was the most notable thing that I ate while in China. (As a side note, later in our trip we were talking with Hiram, and I commented on how it was so exhausting to eat because I had to chew so much, especially those crazy tomato noodles. He started laughing, and then admitted that he only chews those about 3 times and then pretty much swallows them whole. We all had good laugh at that. I'm glad to know I'm not the only one who finds those somewhat difficult to eat. )

I consider getting to know Hiram one of the best things about our trip to Beijing. He was about our age and was fun to talk to not as a tour guide, but as a person who grew up in another culture. We all three shared stories and asked questions. It has been my experience that humor can have difficulty translating in different languages and cultures, but I was surpised by how our senses of humor meshed so well. It was a joy watching him laugh at Jon doing crazy things and at our dumb jokes. Three cheers for Hiram!