Today, we all went to a pizza buffet afterschool called Origus. The restaurant was styled so that you pay for your meal at the front and seat yourself. When you pay at the front counter, they give you a receipt and a set of utensils to prevent customers from trying to cheat their way into a free meal. Before we were all seated, I went with Alice to deposit money from the bank. I didn’t want her to go alone because I did not want her to get mugged, even though it was a short walk from the restaurant. After we paid at the counter and went to sit down with the rest of the group, the servers thought some members of our group had not paid yet. Alice and I had our receipts and we showed it to them, but they still demanded to see more receipts even though they already collected some receipts earlier. We did not understand what the servers were trying to say to us, but they seemed upset and kept pointing at the casher’s table, suggesting that we pay for our meals. From what I could tell, some of the servers were new and did not know the procedures of the restaurant too well. We were also getting upset because we already paid for our meals, but we were unable to communicate with them. This calamity arose because of their negligence to remember whose receipt they had already received.
If this happened back at home in California, it would have been very easy to talk to the servers and sort everything out. Instead, we were waving our hands around and used broken Chinese to speak to the servers. I even went up to the cashiers table and asked them if any of them could speak in Cantonese...but no one was able to. it was SO FRUSTRATING! They tried counting the receipts again and realized that they had some hidden under some old plates, but we were still missing one receipt. In the end, they stopped bothering us because get ready for it…they stopped serving the food! That was just the cherry on top because we did not know that they were going to stop serving food at 12 ‘o clock and spent all of this time trying to argue with the servers. The worst part about it is that we paid 48 quai for the food, which did not taste too good at all! They had really bad pizza (it was thin and sauceless), skewers (the skewers from the streets taste better), imitation sushi, and desserts. The only things that I really enjoyed were the skewers, since it is so hard to find good meat to eat in Beijing, and the gelatin. The gelatin was soooo good because it had little bits of lychee in it, something I have never tried before. In all, it was a good learning experience…but everyone else in the group agreed that it has been one of the worst encounters we have had so far. I mean, just because there is a little miscommunication with some foreigners doesn’t mean you have to treat them with so much disrespect. The servers downright mad dogged us (sorry, I know that term is SO fourth grade, but it’s true)!
