Sand worm salad and Pizza Hut

Sometimes meals here require a post all to themselves and Monday's meals fit the bill.

The staff from Suixi took us out for lunch.  Let me describe the setting.

You drive in and on one side of you is an open air kitchen with a variety of animals and fish living and swimming - not realizing their days are numbered.   On the other side is a building that looks like a run down hotel with outside enterances.  However, the rooms are actually your "table."

We walked into the room to a huge table with THE BIGGEST lazy Susan I have ever seen.  There was food already on it....and the food just kept coming!  Once there was one layer of food around the lazy Susan they would start a second layer.

I stuck to things I recognized and that didn't have eyes.  One of the salads look slightly suspicious and come to find out it was sand worms on the greens.  THANK THE LORD I DIDN'T TRY THAT!

It helped that I was sitting by team members and not the locals otherwise they would have required me to try everything (or at least hide the food as some of the girls did).   I had beef noodles, broccoli, fried iris root (which tasted kind of like funnel cake), beans, and I'm sure some other things that I can't remember because at this point I have had probably 20 Chinese meals.

We drove to Maoming after Suixi and after checking into our hotel (that have cool bathrooms but beds harder than the floor) we went to Pizza Hut.

Yes, Pizza Hut and KFC are quite popular here.  However, Pizza Hut is not like our Pizza Huts at home.  They are more along the lines of Applebee's.  They had fajitas, steak, and other things besides pizza.  And because many of the chemicals that are common in the States are banned here, the pizza is actually really good.

I had a personal pan veggie pizza that included corn on it.  I could have had a bacon wrapped shrimp pizza but felt that was a little bit of over kill.  I could have had hot corn juice but decided to pass on that as well.

Again, the waitress brought water just like they bring glasses of water in the states except if you have been following along at home, the Chinese get a kick out of drinking hot water.  So once again, we ordered ice water and she looked at us like we were crazy.  She brought us two slightly larger glasses of ice water to split among the 8 of us.

We had our translators with us so they helped us order.  Heaven help you if you just want a cheese pizza.  There is no such thing so we ended up ordering a Hawaiian pizza with no ham and no pineapple.  I have found that other counties sometimes have a hard time thinking outside the box so it often makes life interesting.

We are headed back to Pizza Hut tonight sans translators so who knows what we will end up with....

Hopefully something I recognize and not sand worms!