Eating at a korean restaurant, with indonesians, in China.

So, an american and 4 indonesians walk into a bar. Andrew, his sister Mariska and their friends Andrian and Christian invited me to go eat with them at a korean restaurant a short busride away from campus. The bus was fun, like trying to stay mounted on a bucking bronco, except since it was a bus, it was like trying to stay standing while someone trys to take your legs out from under you. Like I said, fun.

At the restaurant we went to, [insert name when known], they served you several little dishes of different food, vegetables, fruits, crabmeat. All sorts of different appetizers. It was all free. After that, they keep you waiting for several minutes until they brought the main course. I'm sure not everyone has to wait, but we did. Regardless of the service provided (negligable) the meal was fun.

When the meal finally arrived, it was several dishes of uncooked meat. I should mention, in the middle of our table was a small firepit, a stove, with a smoke vent above us. We cooked our meat ourselves, from raw and bloody to questionably cooked (in my opinion) all by ourselves (everyone but me helped, since I don't know the first thing about cooking out). The food tasted pretty good, but I didn't think there was very much of it. We had lamb, pork, chicken and beef. Which segues into an interesting thing about the english language. We have different names for our meat than our animals.

Sheep-Lamb, Mutton
Cow-Beef, Veal
Pig-Pork
Chicken-Poultry
Rabbit-Rabbit
Squirrel-Squirrel

The reason behind this has to do with the different social classes. The lower class, poor and hungry, would eat cheap, easily hunted meat, like rabbit and squirrel, while the landed gentry and such could afford the meat of stock animals, but, because they were a higher class, they couldn't use the same names as the peasentry that raised the animals did. Another, perhaps more telling aspect of this is that most of the higher class meat names come from french, while the lower class words come from german.

Or something like that. Look it up if you're curious, and let me know.