Friday Adventures.

Today we tried yet another food option and also revisited our new Ma River walk.  The closest KFC is just about 15 minutes walk up the street our hotel faces on.  There is also a 2 or 3 story grocery-department store above the KFC.  Well, around the corner from KFC are 2 local food eating places.  We looked into one of them and a waitress immediately urged us to enter and be seated.  We had not yet decided to eat there and were a bit hesitant.  She handed us a menu in Chinese which we could not read. Rod told her that and she handed us a menu in English.  Even that was not self-explanatory.  But we decided to jump into a new experience and were seated.  We took casual note of what others were eating but failed to notice that all had "soup" on their table.  Fortunately, another customer seated near us, Yvonne, overheard us struggling to communicate and order with our waitress.  Yvonne, is Chinese but later told us she spent a year in Chicago.  Her English was very good, and an extra plus was that she had worked as a waitress.  So Yvonne, took pencil and menu in hand and mediated between our wishes and what was offered and we got our order placed.  The restaurant is a hotpot restaurant, which means all meals center around a hotplate (or 2) in the center of each table which has hot water boiling away with a soup base of your choice.  Then you select the meats and veggies you want to put into your boiling pot.  They also have little garnishes to choose from to sprinkle over your rice and cooked items.  We chose minced garlic, cilantro, thin rounds of red chili peppers, a peanut-flavored sauce, and green onions.  We opted for veggies in our hotpot which included potato slices, cabbage leaves, more cilantro, chunks of tofu, tomato pieces, and some onion.  As the pot boils and the veggies are soft, you select them and place them over your bowl of rice.  It was very nice and the broth in the pot only improves as it boils down.  So it was a fun food adventure...like unto what we enjoyed with Rod's colleagues years ago at SP in Singapore.