Fili’s world

At the beginning of the previous semester, through people I know in China, I got to meet the two Chinese students who received the Israeli scholarship for Chinese students to study Hebrew in Jerusalem.  Last week, after they recovered the disappointment from the Egyptian government which didn’t allow them entry into Egypt, we threw a little dinner get-together with a few Israeli friends who study with the East-Asia department and the two Chinese girls for a late Chinese New Years celebration. The choice for the restaurant was "Mandarin", up on the corner of Jaffa and Shlomtzion st., a restaurant that’s considered the only decent non-Kosher Chinese cuisine in Jerusalem.

The restaurant staff and owners are Chinese, and I thought that it would mean that the girls would feel more at home being able to browse through a Chinese menu and converse in Mandarin with the waiter, but there was no Chinese menu, and the Chinese staff had close to zero Mandarin skills, being from Hongkong and mainly speaking Cantonese. On the way there we kept promising the girls authentic "Dimsum" only to realize at the table that the Shandong girls didn’t really recognize what we meant when we used this Cantonese word for dumplings, yet we were quite pleased with the Dimsum offered. Following was a selection of beef, chicken, duck and sea-food dishes, with titles like "Mongolian BBQ" and explanations sounding like "Chicken, yes, spicy not spicy, all very good". It was a pretty good attempt compared to other Chinese restaurants in Jerusalem, even though quite far from my culinary experiences in Asia (or at the Taiwanese visit the previous weekend).

 On the way out, I got a few minutes of conversation with the friendly Chinese waiter hearing his stories about escaping the hectic HK life to spend more time being close to god in Jerusalem.

It was a nice Chinese style hangout and I hope that the Chinese girls felt more at home during the Chinese newyears away from their families with good friends and some Chinese food.