The AA formula
Dear royalists,
In the famous country owned by King Carl G, when eating out people usually order one dish each (don’t want any of our friends’ germs do we?). In the glourious country owned by chairman Fei Zhu, people usually order a lot of dishes together and share them. A little bit like a smorgasbord, which oddly is a Swedish term. But here all the dishes are in the middle of the table and everybody uses their own germy chopsticks to pick the oily food, sometimes on a round spinning thing, so you can share all food with everybody around the table.
This causes some strange problems when it’s time to settle the bill. In the blue yellow country everybody can order whatever they want to, since they usually just pay for what they ate. But in the eastern red country this is not possible since it’s difficult to calculate who ate what and how much of each dish. So at the end of each meal there is usually a small fight over who should settle the bill. Actually nobody wants to pay, but still everybody is waving the Mao bills trying to give it to the service people. So usually it’s decided before the meal who’s treat it will be, but this also causes a problem since everybody cannot order everything they want to, since it’s not so nice to order the most expensive dishes when somebody else will pay for it. At family dinners, the oldest one usually takes care of the bill. But the flying pig has witnessed younger family members running to the counter before the rest of the family has even finished eating to pay for the bill.
Among younger people and students or when you are a lot of people eating, you solve the problem by two simple characters: “AA” (prounounced in English). This has nothing to do with alcohol which some may think. It simply means that you split the bill by a simple formula and something the flying pig is using most of the time while flying around in Shanghai. But when eating out in Sichuan it’s usually the fighting that will settle the bill. A couple of years ago the flying pig saw two of his older professors fighting over a chicken pot bill at the Jiading campus. Professor Computer Graphics lost the fight since Professor Softare Project Management was older, richer and more famous. But now the flying pig will head out for some late lunch on the day when people usually demonstrates for fun, but of course not here in PRC, since nobody has any complaints about anything. Everything is perfect in Utopia, Shangri-La, Paradise, Heaven on earth or whatever you may call it.
Sincerely Yours
Fei Zhu, the AAer
