About once a week we go out to dinner at our favorite noodle shop. It cost about $5 for all of us to eat noodle and rice 'til our heart's content. We really like a dish called tu dou niu rou - meat and potatoes, over rice or noodles. The kids eat.it.up! And, honestly, so do we. David visits this noodle shop an average of twice a week since he also goes at lunch time when he just can't stomach a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. We've been able to get to know the owners and they now know what we like to order. Our first few trips here were a little shaky as we did not have the language we needed to order. David had the fantastic idea of taking a picture of the menu and translating it, character by character, so we would at least have SOME idea of what was in each dish. About 2 weeks after he accomplished that mammoth task - they changed the menu :) Fortunately almost every noodle shop in town sells the same things so as long as you know the name of the dish you want you can order it anywhere, whether or not you can read the menu.
