Eating from shared platters and minding your manners...

The food we ate was wonderful, one of my favorite parts of the trip. The main dish we enjoyed was called chebu jein or rice and fish. They serve it on huge platters on the floor. You can imagine a large pizza cut into as many pieces as there are people around the dish and that is your portion. The fish are served with head, skin, tails and all and you pull it apart to eat it. You eat by reaching in with your right hand (never the left hand since that hand is reserved for toileting) and taking a handful of rice, fish and vegetables and squeeze it into a wad, shaking off the extra grains of rice and sauce. When the wad is in a neat ball, you put it in your mouth. At the end of the meal, the floor mat you were sitting on is taken to the roof and shaken out. We got very good at eating this way and it was delicious food. It wasn't always rice and fish either. Sometimes it was chicken, or beef, or goat, and sometimes there were noodles or spaghetti instead of rice. There were always vegetables. Most we knew like carrots and cabbage, some we didn't recognise, but they were good.