Eating and Stuff ...
New continent, new country, new family, new diet. Makes a whole lot of sense, and I'm glad they didn't try to adapt their food to me (or maybe they did, but in such a sneaky way that I didn't notice). Parts of the family were intent on always giving me the option of using a knife and fork though, which came in handy during the first few days. You don't need long to get into chopsticks though, not if you have two meals a day and have decided to get the hang of them. And I had. It feels much more elegant than knife and fork, and just needs one hand too.
Dinner followed the formula soup/rice/various dishes which, as you realize, leaves plenty of room for variation :-) ... Nothing but soup to drink might sound a bit dry, but it's no problem with the right kind of soup. I kept getting my rice on a plate all the time, so I usually drank my soup along with eating rice and other stuff while the rest of the family usually had the soup first and then refilled the bowl with rice. Pick other stuff directly from the serving plates as you like (and, in my case, get some more put on your plate by orders from High Command :-).
The table was covered in plastic, so anything you couldn't eat, bones and stuff, you just spat out on the table. Plates are for unchewed stuff only :-) ...
Quite often we had some fruit for dessert, dragonfruit being the coolest looking one by far. I don't think a written description can do it justice, but it's red and green on the outside, and the inside is white and dotted with lots of small (just dots) black seeds. Slice and eat like a melon. Nice, even if the taste couldn't compete with the looks in unusuality.
