Blount: What wine with donkey?

Last update: August 13, 2008 - 11:29 AM

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The language barrier can be daunting in China, but there's usually a way around it. The helpful people here want to understand us. We want to communicate with them. So both parties keep working until they find a solution, something that happened twice in the past days for me.

After arriving at the basketball arena Monday evening for the China-U.S. women's basketball game, I was summoned to a small interview session with Hugh McCutcheon, son-in-law of Todd and Barbara Bachman. I had to get to the Beijing Hilton on the exact opposite side of town. How was I going to communicate that to the taxi driver? And what if he didn't know how to get there?

Two volunteers at the arena came to the rescue. They wrote out the name of the hotel and the address in Chinese, then found directions on the Internet and wrote them as well. Just in case, they wrote down the hotel phone number and added a note that said: Call this number if you get lost! The driver understood perfectly and got me there in short order.

Tuesday night, former colleague Jay Weiner and I were able to get away from the Games to have dinner in a restaurant. We walked to the neighborhood across from the Main Press Center, where every business had the Olympics on TV -- and one had half a dozen employees gathered around cheering. We saw a modest-looking restaurant and went in. No one spoke English and the menu was in Chinese, but with pictures.

Well, the pictures didn't tell us all that much. One dish looked like beef with vegetables, so I pointed to it. The server smiled and shook her head. She was obviously trying to discourage us from ordering this, but why?

She pointed to a painting hanging above our table. It was a donkey. Then she pointed to the picture of the food. That was all I needed to know. We went with the chicken instead.

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