Negotiating language

When eating out, we avoid the "tourist trap" restaurants with their bi-lingual menus and high prices. We must therefore negotiate language with staff who know only a few words of English. I've picked up just a little Mandarin, but that's not the dialect most Nanjing residents speak. We negotiate menu items using our Chinese phrase book. Frequently, the restaurant workers, pull out their English phrase book. This was how we found out that one restaurant worker thought 'fish' was an English word meaning 'lamb.' When we've succeeding in ordering, eating and paying, both we and the restaurant staff are apt to feel triumphant. Above, restaurant workers at a moderately priced Nanjing restaurants.