Thursday 24 May 2012

How do you call this?

My parents and I were going for dim sum with some of my relatives on a Sunday morning. The restaurant is located on the fifth level of a large mall. On Sunday mornings, because there's no other malls around, and because it is the transit transfer destination of the light rail, the buses, and other modes of transport, there's already lots of lots of people there (to use the Chinese expression mountains and seas of people). The design of the mall makes it so that you have to walk the mall, sort of like the Rideau Centre in Ottawa: the elevators are hidden, the escalators are not adjacent to each other but are on the opposite ends.

I get to the fourth floor to go up to the restaurant and I smell McDonald's breakfast before I see it. Not only am I hungry, I realize, I want a McMuffin. But even though I speak Cantonese, when I don't know how to read Chinese and when I don't know the names of the food in Chinese, all I can do to order something is to describe it.
Me: I want an Egg and Cheese McMuffin.
Cashier: What?
Me: An Egg and Cheese McMuffin. (upon seeing a picture of a sausage mcmuffin on the board) That! Number 10 except without the sausage!
Cashier: So you want a Sausage McMuffin without the Sausage?
Me: Yes, I guess, an Egg McMuffin.
Cashier: A Sausage McMuffin withou the Sausage it is.

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