Chicken feet dim sum3/1/2024 ![]() Moreover, it was yet another story in my ever-growing arsenal about stories of kindness. But I arrived just at the same time as those girls, and I had people to sit with, and to diffuse the awkwardness by laughing at ourselves. ![]() And I’d never have known what a chicken’s foot tastes like. More likely I would have wandered away feeling frustrated at myself, and bought breakfast at one of the tourist restaurants with English menus and scrambled eggs. I might not even have had breakfast there at all. Serendipity, kismet, happy accident… whatever you want to call it, I wouldn’t have had that experience if I’d arrived at the restaurant at any other time. We shared a small dim sum feast, chatting away, and I was so grateful to them for having rescued me. I felt a little awkward for gate crashing their holiday, especially in the face of their giddy excitement (remember the rush of your first trip abroad?), but they were so sweet. My new friends were on holiday from Phuket their first holiday away without parents, after working weekend jobs around their studies to save up. Thankfully, the Thai girls – also pros with a chopstick – just laughed and passed the napkins. Again, I was the obvious outsider eating with my hands, spitting out tiny fragments of knuckle, making a mess. Everyone else in the restaurant was performing some kind of chopstick wizardry to eat them, which I honestly think would take years of dedicated practice to perfect. Except that there’s even less meat, and dozens of tiny little bones to negotiate your clumsy way around. Taste-wise, it was just like a chicken wing. Ignorance is bliss! And it really wasn’t that bad. But there I was, wondering if I was eating a monkey’s paw, or if there is perhaps a body part I’ve not yet come across that resembles a three-fingered hand. But I’d have found it a lot harder to take the first bite if I’d known what I was facing!Ī cooked chicken’s foot looks so much like, well, a cooked chicken’s foot, that it’s ever so slightly ridiculous that I didn’t twig. ![]() Google would later enlighten me that they were chicken feet, a pretty popular dish in Asia. Everyone else was eating them, and they smelled good, so I decided not to ask. In fact, they weren’t shaped like anything I’d ever eaten before. Sitting down at a table now laden down with different dishes, I took a closer look at my “ribs” and realised that they weren’t at all rib shaped. ![]() Afterall, that’s always on my order from the Chinese takeaway at home. One of them was some kind of meat on the bone in a sticky looking sauce, which – at a glance – I’d assumed was barbecue ribs. No one spoke much English, and I didn’t really know what anything was, so I just pointed at a handful of random dishes. The next hurdle was knowing what I was ordering. We could all be confused together, they told me. I was just about ready to walk away, too Britishly addicted to queuing to ever snare a table so forcefully, but the girls waved me over and insisted I sit with them. A table became available, and the fastest of the girls bagged it before the last of the former occupants had even left their seat. Equally unsure of the system, and just as lost amongst the Malay and Hokkien Chinese languages swirling in the heavily scented air around us, a group of three Thai teenagers took pity on me. I had arrived exactly at the same moment as another group of outsiders. Serendipity was smiling at me that day, though. I am the new kid in the playground a sweaty, uncomfortable bystander, wanting to join in but unsure how. They know how to find a table, how to order, how the system works. The locals, casually passing plates and chatting – over the clash of sounds from the open kitchen and the bustle of servers with trolleys of steaming dim sum plates – come here every weekend. Everyone else knows exactly what they’re doing. Often, when I travel, I feel like the awkward outsider. There were people queuing on the pavement outside, too, as though waiting to be seated by a staff member that never came. Every table was full, and snaking around them was a jumbled, confusing queue that had no clear end and several different beginnings. Teeming with the kind of impenetrable organised chaos that seems vital to everyday life in South East Asia. Awkward and uncertain as ever, I was standing uncomfortably on the pavement outside a busy dim sum restaurant in George Town’s Chinatown district, shuffling my feet and trying, uselessly, to blend in.
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