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bliumchikMy life occasionally beats out Fawlty Towers for comedy value. Generally this happens whenever you assemble a critical mass of Oblivious relatives in one room. Today, for instance, it was my grandad German's seventy fourth birthday party. This is the side of the family that spawned such gems as "I thought the egg was boiled" and "boys have, you know, equipment." Need I go on? Well, as a matter of fact, yes.
There is a pattern to these family outings.
The first phase of the evening involves waiting for the various latecomers - it mostly consists of smalltalk and a few phone calls (invariably foiled by poor phone coverage, low batteries, ancestral incompetence or all of the above) as my gran Ira remembers that she gave gran Sofia slightly wrong street directions.
This merges seamlessly into Stage 2: Arguing Over The Menu, where the real comic genius emerges. The restaurant is the kind with the spinning wooden disk on the table for dish-sharing convenience, which therefore required some degree of consensus about the food. My great-uncle Leon is a rational man and had been here before (both literally and metaphorically), so immediately set to composing a suggested menu, which he then proceeded to read aloud for our benefit.
Lest I make that sound too simple, allow me to note here that this reading was punctuated by, in short, my mother's bad ear, two phone calls, an argument about soup, my great-aunt's persistent inquiries about relative spiciness, the arrival of my dad from the carpark, the presenting of the card and a novelty mug to my grandad, an argument about the amount of servings necessary, the arrival of my other grandparents, the waiter's inquiry re: drinks (this prompted a brief self-contained argument about soda water), and my brother's ringing refusal to eat his conveniently chopped and nutritious banana. A good half of these interruptions required Uncle Leon to start reading again from the beginning.
So once we'd heard that out and hammered out the details of various side dishes, we called over a waiter to order. There is honestly little funnier than three generations of Russians trying to order Asian food in English. Leaving aside the trivial background issues that inevitably come of Russian-accented Chinese food names, there remained much cause for me to sink down slowly in my chair hoping for the relief of an elephant stampede or perhaps a zombie apocalypse. For one thing it took the entire table and a frazzled waiter entirely too long to work out that "portion" and "serving" mean the same thing.
And then there was the Peking Duck Incident. Some of you may be aware that this dish consists of two courses, the first being the skin of the duck on pancakes, and the second the actual duck in various forms (such as omelet, which was awesome). My family managed to get this drummed into their heads after an embarrassingly long conversation with the waiter (full of repetition and wild hand-waving). But it wasn't until the chef ventured out to tactfully explain that the ducks were actually kind of a little bit HUGE that it occurred to us that ordering four was perhaps overkill.
Thank god we got that sorted out in time, because it turned out when the food arrived that this was not the only dish whose size was misinterpreted. In other words, Uncle Leon had severely overestimated the carrying capacity of the average Oblivious family stomach. We managed to cancel one order in time, but this still left us with two big damn plates of each of the chicken, noodles, fried rice, duck, garlic prawns and vegetables, not to mention the soup. This maxed out not only our digestive systems but also the turntable. The waiters desperately shifted and balanced plates as I tried my best not to actually fall over laughing.
We got a doggie bag.
There is a pattern to these family outings.
The first phase of the evening involves waiting for the various latecomers - it mostly consists of smalltalk and a few phone calls (invariably foiled by poor phone coverage, low batteries, ancestral incompetence or all of the above) as my gran Ira remembers that she gave gran Sofia slightly wrong street directions.
This merges seamlessly into Stage 2: Arguing Over The Menu, where the real comic genius emerges. The restaurant is the kind with the spinning wooden disk on the table for dish-sharing convenience, which therefore required some degree of consensus about the food. My great-uncle Leon is a rational man and had been here before (both literally and metaphorically), so immediately set to composing a suggested menu, which he then proceeded to read aloud for our benefit.
Lest I make that sound too simple, allow me to note here that this reading was punctuated by, in short, my mother's bad ear, two phone calls, an argument about soup, my great-aunt's persistent inquiries about relative spiciness, the arrival of my dad from the carpark, the presenting of the card and a novelty mug to my grandad, an argument about the amount of servings necessary, the arrival of my other grandparents, the waiter's inquiry re: drinks (this prompted a brief self-contained argument about soda water), and my brother's ringing refusal to eat his conveniently chopped and nutritious banana. A good half of these interruptions required Uncle Leon to start reading again from the beginning.
So once we'd heard that out and hammered out the details of various side dishes, we called over a waiter to order. There is honestly little funnier than three generations of Russians trying to order Asian food in English. Leaving aside the trivial background issues that inevitably come of Russian-accented Chinese food names, there remained much cause for me to sink down slowly in my chair hoping for the relief of an elephant stampede or perhaps a zombie apocalypse. For one thing it took the entire table and a frazzled waiter entirely too long to work out that "portion" and "serving" mean the same thing.
And then there was the Peking Duck Incident. Some of you may be aware that this dish consists of two courses, the first being the skin of the duck on pancakes, and the second the actual duck in various forms (such as omelet, which was awesome). My family managed to get this drummed into their heads after an embarrassingly long conversation with the waiter (full of repetition and wild hand-waving). But it wasn't until the chef ventured out to tactfully explain that the ducks were actually kind of a little bit HUGE that it occurred to us that ordering four was perhaps overkill.
Thank god we got that sorted out in time, because it turned out when the food arrived that this was not the only dish whose size was misinterpreted. In other words, Uncle Leon had severely overestimated the carrying capacity of the average Oblivious family stomach. We managed to cancel one order in time, but this still left us with two big damn plates of each of the chicken, noodles, fried rice, duck, garlic prawns and vegetables, not to mention the soup. This maxed out not only our digestive systems but also the turntable. The waiters desperately shifted and balanced plates as I tried my best not to actually fall over laughing.
We got a doggie bag.
