Weirdo

Last week I ate my second western meal since I’ve been in China. There is an American guy here who owns a Mexican restaurant, which right next to his “Irish” pub. I’d try to refrain from being a dick, but the quotation marks have already exposed my snobbishness on that topic.  I went with my new Russian friend because I was in the full on throes of chips and salsa withdrawal, and I needed a fix. It turned out to be decent enough, but an odd thing revealed itself to me when I was eating.

As my family, and a few others of you whom have eaten enough meals with me, can attest to, I have some odd eating habits. I have some compulsion that leads me to separate most of my foods on my plate and then proceed to eat everything at an equal pace so that I always have enough of each thing on my plate to match the others. If you think this sounds weird, you have no idea how weird it really is.

So what I noticed as I was eating my tacos, beans, and rice, is that I had subconsciously fallen back into this behavior when presented with a food that I must associate with the west. And you must believe me, this isn’t me just making some odd story up about how I eat and then, “Oops! Look what I did!”, I really did it without thinking.

Anyways, what this means is that I had not been practicing my eating ritual with all the Chinese food I eat here. This is for two reasons. First, when eating with others (a common occurrence), the food comes out in separate dishes, and you just get stuck in. No time for organizing and allocating food resources. If someone else is getting aggressive on the fried eggplant or twice cooked pork (two of my favorites), you sure as hell better be aggressive too, rationing be damned. Second, when eating alone, most dishes are served all mixed up to begin with and then served with rice. This means there are no meat, veg, chips, salad, etc. to match up: it’s all together.

So that happened. What I can relate to this incident is how easy it is to change habits when in a totally new environment. I’ve made some conscious, and obviously some subconscious, changes that I never would have been able to make back home. Perhaps not never, but certainly not without Herculean effort, which can be hard to drum up.

Quick video from this week that I shot for no other reason than it struck me to do so at the time.