When you move overseas you adapt. Well, you do if you want happiness to be a part of your life abroad. Sometimes, it strikes you just how far you have adapted to a new country when you least expect it. Like when you order a Chinese takeaway.
Chinese Takeaway English Style
At the end of a long, tiring but fun day at Legoland in Windsor, England everyone wanted something quick and easy. A Chinese takeaway was in order. We ordered a set meal for four and prepared ourselves to dig in and get chomping.
It turned out to be a thought provoking meal for me. I found the meal pretty bland in all honesty. There were no real recognisable spices to liven the meal up, nothing to set one dish apart from the other – except the fluorescent orange sauce that is common to all Chinese takeaway meals, no matter which country you order in.
Chinese Takeaway Dutch Style
Not long after moving to the Netherlands in 2000, I had my first Chinese takeaway Dutch style. My Dutch partner showed me the menu and I looked at it and at him blankly.
Back then, not only were my Dutch language skills minimalistic, but the words I did know didn’t tally with anything on the menu. The only exceptions were kip and ui intermittently scattered among strange words, which were apparently meal choices.
Chinese restaurants adapt their food for the country they are in. That much I learnt very quickly. And of course, Chinese restaurants here in the Netherlands tend to offer a little more than just ‘Chinese”: Indonesian, Cantonese, Thais and Surinam specialities are common on a Dutch menu.
This is how the conversation went to settle on a dinner order all those years ago:
Me: “Er.. are pork balls on the menu?”
Dutch Partner: *Blank look*
Me: “You know, pork in crispy stuff with sweet and sour sauce?”
DP: “No.”
Me: “Crispy duck with pancakes and plum sauce then?”
DP: “Duck yes. With pancakes, no.”
Me: “Erm… anything that I might remotely recognise?”
DP: “Nasi? Bami pangang?”
Me: *Silence and a distant look whilst I contemplated the extent of my homesickness…..*
Me: “Just order something…,” I mumbled.
Adapting to Life Abroad
Many years later, sitting in my dad’s house in England, I wondered how it was possible that the Chinese I used to eat in England had tasted better to me than that first Chinese meal I had had in the Netherlands.
And how now, as I sat looking at Chilli Beef, which had not been within ten miles of a chilli pepper, I found the Chinese food in the Netherlands far tastier than the British Chinese offerings. More spices. A lot more flavour. Just more taste all-round.
The answer of course is simple. When you move overseas it’s not just a physical journey across the miles, it is also a journey of adaptation. Living in a new country involves getting used to new things – tastes, habits, words, cultures, ideas.
New becomes the norm. Old becomes unfamiliar.
It’s funny how a simple Chinese meal made me realise just how far my journey abroad had brought me.
Over to You
What little things make you realise how far you have adapted to life in a new country?
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