My first hotpot experience occurred within hours of arriving in Chongqing. I took my recuperation moments and was already reluctant to open Pandora’s suitcase. My laziness was salvaged by a knock on my door. I opened up and there stood Chad, the longhaired, Mexican-American who would end up playing a role high up the bill in my first year in China as my soon-to-be colleague and housemate.
Head still reeling from jetlag, dehydration and sleep deprivation, me and Chad resolved to search for something to eat and wandered into the chaos of Jiu Jie in the middle of Jiangbei district. It was a bright and intense introduction to our new lives. The buildings were alive with light, as were the trees which were draped in all manner of lights with the Chinese New Year not far away. A variety of odd vehicles whooshed past us on the pavement, some with too many people straddled over them. We shortly came upon a row of restaurants lined with tables with holes in the centre of them.
Fumbling your way through a conversation with a thick language barrier is an awkward and embarrassing experience. Even more so in a public space with an unsettling audience of spectators. I’m more than used to this now, but even with a half empty pocket of acquired Chinese, the embarrassment still manages to slice through me.
Myself, Chad and Google Translate struggled through until eventually we had a beer each and a multitude of raw ingredients on our table. I couldn’t make out what many of them were, which was perhaps a good thing at that point. Shortly after, we would find out that typical hotpot dishes include: duck blood and intestines, cow stomach, pig brain and pig cartilage. Our introduction to Chongqing’s totem was slow and blessed with ignorance.
The hotpot lived up to its reputation. Though my love for the dish would not form until a few weeks later, the process of dropping your own food into the hot, bloody oil and hunting for it with chopsticks when cooked was a unique dining thrill by itself. I had discovered a world of flavour that I had never been close to in my life and I was intrigued by what else lay ahead.
What took me by surprise was the first of many hotpot hangovers. Without being too graphic, we all know that spicy food is notorious for the wrath it brings upon the digestive system. Hotpot does something on a level that comes on so suddenly and so harshly that it plunges your body into a survival mode shock state, the only antidote being a toilet.
There are some problems with this. The first being that Chongqing bathrooms are among the first steps of cultural shock to negotiate through. Public bathrooms are tricky ground for some at the best of times. Chinese bathrooms could knock many British adults into a shock if they were confronted with the hole in the floor, as though the toilet had been crushed from above like a Coke can.
I say Chinese, it seems Chongqing has more of a preference for these, let’s stick with ‘holes’, than other places around China. In fact, the estate agent who took me and my girlfriend house hunting chirpily remarked that she ’couldn’t poo in a Western toilet’. I think you’d find the inverse would hold true for many of my beloved country people too.
I do like a ‘real’ toilet. However, there is something to the adventure that the holes bring forth. Any part of your daily routine that can be challenged is healthy perspective shifting experience and one that should never be shied away from. I do, however, go to great lengths to avoid them if I can…
Which brings me to point number 2 of hotpot hangovers – the sheer unpredictability of the TIME of arrival and the hellish alarm bells the body thrashes out while it desperately pleads to evacuate all that chilli and red oil.
A real hangover swiftly wraps its dark cloak around you as you wake. The hotpot hangover bides its time, slowly ticking its internal clock which rings only when in public and ten-thousand leagues away from the comfort of your own porcelain paradise. Perhaps this is as close I will get to heroin withdrawals. The sweat cooks and spurts out, cold shivers dance all the way up and slowly wind back down the spine, guttural somersaults, wild bathroom fantasies, heaving and tensing begin wringing out the abdomen. It’s a time that reverts man back to beast and is satisfied usually in the piss poor public toilet conditions that seem deserving of the sad scene that has been created.
Enough about all this. I had to get it out.
