Epic Fail!

One of the hardships (relatively speaking) of this SH experience is ordering food in a restaurant. A lot of places now have menus with pictures and descriptions in English, albeit sometimes incorrect. But most hole-in-the-wall places just have a large words-only menu on the wall. Usually at these sorts of places I just order from the first 2 things listed on the menu, which normally is what the place is known for i.e. beef hand-pulled noodle soup. This requires very little of my Chinese-deciphering skills, but it also means a limit on the variety of things I try. This method usually works but the other day, I was meeting a friend who was going back to Taiwan, and she suggested we try a cafe-type place near my apartment for their desserts.

I recognized the words for "red bean shaved ice" on one of these word-only menus and I asked the waiter how big the serving would be. He was very vague and said, "If you order it, you'll find out" to which my friend responded, "Well I want to know if I should order a serving for myself." After much back and forth, he measures with his fingers a circular shape of about 3 inches in diameter. We both thought this was really weird, and figured the waiter was just being lazy about it. So we decide to just order one first to try it.He brought this out and both of us were like "WTF mate?" I volunteered to venture a taste first to spare Friend since she had paid. It wasn't even that it tasted gross...it tasted like nothing. It was literally a cup of water with ice and two spoonfuls of red bean tossed in. Literally. I couldn't even muster a polite "Oh, it's not that bad" expression, so Friend asked the waiter to add something to flavor it more. He brings it back and we stare at it trying to figure out what's different. More ice. At this point, Friend is in such disbelief, she can't do anything but sputter fragments of, "I've never--this is just---what the heck---I--what is--." The freakin red bean ice water cost 20 rmb so she asks the waiter to put it in a to-go container, although frankly I don't know what she was going to do with it--it's just hard to spend 20 rmb on something and waste it. For reference I can get a perfectly acceptable pearl milk tea for 6rmb somewhere else. The waiter says, "We don't do to-go orders, you can't take it with you, you have to finish it here," which was met with another round of sputtering, from both of us this time. We got up and left and Friend said, "I'll take you to somewhere that serves real red bean shaved ice. I was a little afraid. We weren't disappointed. It even had pudding (think flan-like, not Jello pudding-like) in the middle. Yum! We both sighed in relief when the waitress rounded the corner of our booth with this familiar sight.