Incoming!

For the next two weeks, I'm hosting a group of six engineers from our China office here in Indy. Having been through this before it will, no doubt, provide some wonderful stories for the blog. Four of the six guests have never been in the United States before, so this should be good.

Today for lunch, they wanted to go out for "real American" food, so we took them to local BBQ joint Squealers. I considered trying to explain the porky origins of the name "Squealers" but feared it wouldn't translate, and I wasn't about to try and do a demonstration. I have enough credibility problems as it is.

The first issue came when we had to order drinks. They all wanted hot tea, a barbeque staple, but the waitress informed them that this wasn't an option. But after dipping quickly into the kitchen, she came back and said that yes, indeed, you could order hot tea. Unfortunately the jubilation was short lived, when during her next visit, she informed us that they were out of hot tea. She rattled off a list of soft drinks and iced tea and began taking their revised drink orders.

The first guy ordered "hot water." She looked at him for a second, and then without question, wrote down his order. This caused a stir of excitement which led to all of them ordering hot water. Delightful. I've always contended when I'm in China that their green tea tastes mostly like hot water, so this just provided confirmation.

The special of the day was a pulled pork sandwich with potato salad. They all ordered this with various spicy BBQ sauces on the side. When the sandwiches arrived, several of them stared at their sandwiches as though waiting for them to speak.

We tried to show them that you pour the sauce onto the sandwich, mash it down, and then eat it, but apparently we were unsuccessful. One guy got down really close to the plate and sniffed at it. Another one took the entire top off of a ketchup bottle and drowned the pork in ketchup. Another put a pickle in his mouth and promptly let it dribble off his chin, mingled with some delightful hot water. (I recognized this move because I'm fairly certain I've done it myself with a chicken neck or jellyfish foot while on one of my trips over there.)

It's going to be a long week. I shudder to think of what their fellow guests at the hotel breakfast buffet endured this morning...