A weekly ode to the joys of moaning about your holiday.
"I'll order for the table", is a joke I like to make at group dinners in New Zealand. The laugh ratio may be against me, but it's worth it for the flicker of panic in people's eyes when they think for an instant I'm serious. On the odd occasion I get a chuckle, it's usually from someone who's also been hosted to a meal in Asia and had that awkward "free meal vs ordering-what-you-want" cultural conundrum.
In short, it's very much the custom in much of Asia (and undoubtedly much of the world) that if you get invited to dinner at a restaurant, the male half of the inviting couple will not only pay for everyone's meals, he'll take it upon himself to order everyone's meals too.
As someone whose love of free stuff has generally outweighed their love of selecting just what that stuff may be, it isn't always as straightforward with food. You could very well argue, if the chap who organised the dinner has the burden of generations of tradition forcing him to pay for it all, he might as well embrace the more empowering/fun tradition of controlling just what his guests will eat too.
To the outsider this can seem quite odd. You're in Beijing or Manila or Jakarta or Hanoi and whether you're Lazy Susan-ing up a storm or not, you're often drowning in plates of food you don't really want to eat.
