New Foods

During this trip, I've only eaten alone once - and that was the evening I first arrived.  This has included a team lunch and a team dinner (different teams) which both featured entirely new foods to me.  For lunch, we went to a Nepalese restaurant - which although it had some familiar Indian dishes (e.g. chicken tikka masala - but it doesn't taste as nice as it does in the UK), it also had a bunch of Nepalese dishes that I'd never heard of and never had before.  And naturally we tried a bunch of these, and... they weren't really to my taste.  The momos (dumplings) were nice, but there was some other stuff that I don't really have a clue what they were and either didn't like the taste or was too spicy.  And then for team dinner, we went to a - surprise surprise - Chinese restaurant, for some traditional Cantonese food.  So naturally with a predominantly Chinese team, they ordered all kinds of weird stuff - a lot of seafood that I generally passed on, and a bunch of dishes which included stuff that again I'd never heard of and never had before.  Some examples: abalones, daikon, sea cucumber, etc.  But some of the dishes - like pork and beef and duck, were actually really nice.  So it turned into a good meal, even if I didn't eat nearly as much as a lot of the others.  The problem with these team dinners - one that almost inevitably happens - is that people start speaking Chinese to each other and so I get left out of conversations.  It's annoying, it's rude, but I've kind of accepted there's not much I can do about it.