China: Day 3, Part 1 - On Using Chopsticks

When I'm at a Chinese restaurant having a hard time with chopsticks, I always hope that there's a Chinese kid at an American restaurant somewhere who's struggling mightily with a fork. ~Rick Budinich

The day began on a great note. We were treated to a pretty darn good breakfast spread that stretched all the way from Chinese cuisine to Western obsessions. They even had small labels in English, which meant that we actually knew what we were eating. The waitresses were eager and polite, and the food was mostly non-vegetarian.

It began with the salads, where the Chinese thumbed their nose at the vegetarian minorities by including duck meat in the midst of fresh green vegetables. We encountered fresh fruits, some whose names we still struggle to remember (deathberry, was it?) There were dumplings with and without stuffing, and fried noodles. Fried rice and bacon. Sausages and vegetables. Noodles in meat broth. Rice congee with mushrooms. Soya milk and other porridges. All of this, and the conventional fare of corn flakes, muesli, beverages, frozen yoghurt and so on and so forth.

Every morning saw two Indians sitting in the restaurant, attempting to figure out how to use chopsticks, and loading enough fuel into our bodies to last most of the entire day. We did master the art of using chopsticks every morning, only to forget it by the time we went to bed. 
For the uninitiated, using chopsticks involves gripping two twigs in a single hand. You then move them around like you know what you are doing, while you gently curse the food that inexplicably remains at the bottom of your bowl. Then you quietly use your other hand and a fork.
P of course insists that she has always been master at using chopsticks, and in tournaments she has always been the fastest at picking grains of rice, and if the wind was right, even pluck flies out of thin air.

After gorging on enough complimentary food to substantially recover our hotel rent, we head out to discover Dali Old Town, also know as Yu Town. The weather was pleasant, a fine 15 degrees celsius with a hint of sunshine. The streets were clean and empty, the roads cobbled and building beautiful. The Cangshang mountains towered over the town, while on the other end of the city was the Erhai lake.

So off we marched, map and camera in hand to discover life in a renovated ancient Chinese town.