Do you know how impressive it is to watch someone eat a chicken wing with chopsticks? I didn’t, until about a week ago. I guess I had never really thought about something like that before. Of course, I didn’t even attempt. I would have had sauce and chicken all over the place.
Have you ever used chopsticks? Like really used chopsticks… Until we moved to Japan in 2019, I don’t think I ever had. (Don’t worry, living in Japan still didn’t prepare us for living/ eating in South Korea… but we will talk about that later.) I mean maybe I attempted once at a hibachi restaurant. I probably “scooped” up a piece of sushi here or there in college. But I’m not sure that I ever really learned how to truly use them. I’m not sure how I feel about that looking back. But here we are again. Multiple meals a day, using chopsticks to eat… well, everything. Seriously, everything. The aforementioned chicken wings. Pork ribs. Bone in beef. PIZZA. Everyone here probably thinks we are savages because we naturally eat that sort of things with our fingers. We are trying. But eating pizza with chopsticks does not seem realistic at this point. Now I will go ahead and say I have never actually seen someone eat pizza with chopsticks. The others, yes. But we ordered pizza and it came with chopsticks. We drew our own conclusions. Or maybe they were for the random side of sweet pickles that were in the bag with pizza… but that’s a conversation for another day… because what…
We are currently debating what the best option is with Bryn. She barely knows how to use a fork. Thank goodness I brought some with us, so we aren’t totally stunting her growth in that department. We try chopsticks with her every now and then. She will use them to stab stuff but most of the time I spend majority of my meal scraping meat off of a bone with a spoon (the only other utensil at the table) so she can scoop it up with said spoon or eat it with her fingers. She eats a lot of yogurt and fruit! It is easy for her to eat with her hands and it isn’t spicy. Good grief this country likes their spicy foods!
That’s another interesting thing here. When picking out food it can be hard to tell if it is spicy or not. Or what it is at all… for that matter. We like spicy food, so that’s fine but we can’t feed Bryn a bunch of red peppered food. When we order, we tend to rely on pictures. And almost everything has pictures. Which is sometimes great… but sometimes it’s pure trickery.
I briefly mentioned earlier that we thought we were coming in at an advantage having lived in Japan a couple of years ago. Well I was wrong, jokes on us! Chopsticks are different from Japan to Korea and even to other Asian countries. Come to find out, they are a different size... and with that little change, we were holding them wrong here. They are used differently too. You don’t have to eat your rice with them here. You get a spoon for that. Even the learning curve has a learning curve. Coooooool.
Anyway, the whole point of me typing all this was to say, go buy some chopsticks. Take a class in Swahili. Look up how to use a public transportation system. If you are from my hometown it’s hard to imagine why you would need to know how a transit system works... But at least you won’t be starting from scratch in a different language if you end up in Italy. You never know when you might need that skill. Because somehow *cough cough, baseball. Tyler. God.* keeps taking me to these places I never thought I would go. But I wish when I was in school and I was picking those random elective classes that instead of “Art History in America” or “Competency in Motor Skills” (also known as PE), I would have chosen Asian culinary arts or something of that sort. Branch out! You may need it one day!
