A humorous encounter
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Biking along the dreadful G107 last week we, as usual, decided to stop for lunch somewhere around mid-day at a roadside restaurant. This particular place was perhaps a little nicer than the ones we usually stop at, but it would work all the same. There were a number of tables filled with Chinese people playing cards and smoking cigarettes. We took the table near the front window as usual so as to be able to watch our bicycles.
We ordered a number of dishes, mostly delicious. There was one soup however that we ordered that we weren’t too sure of its contents, some mystery fish, the taste ended up being a little less tasty than we had hoped. We are generally really good at making sure we eat all of the food we order, with Pete reigning chairman of the clean plate club, with this being only the second dish we have not finished on this trip. Anyway while trying it Pete found something floating in it, small, black, with wings, and probably packed with protein. A fly of course, not too big of a deal, yet kind of funny all the same.
When we were paying Pete jokingly told the boss that we did not eat the soup because it had a bug in it so the meal it should be cheaper. The boss looked a little confused, looked into the soup, stirred it around a bit and said in a very serious tone “no this isn’t bug soup, it’s fish soup.”
We all thought it was pretty funny, as if it were a perfectly normal thing to accidentally bring a bug soup to the dinner table. Well maybe I found it a bit more funny than the rest but humor can be contagious.
For the record it is not a common thing to see bugs on the menu in China and I have never seen a bug soup, but Nakia and I did try deep fried silk worms once.