Glad I am not like that sad, burger seeking soul that lihaizi was loathfully describing, since I love challenging my taste buds with the exotic tastes of red pepper, and also with red pepper sauce, and with red pepper on everything, and also with red pepper mixed in with rancid old gutter oil, and with undercooked potatoes cover in red pepper, and with all sort of red pepper and grease on doufu. I am glad I am that person that makes him feel superior in life simply because he can eat some local weed, I mean vegetable, covered in oil and red pepper and then imagine that he is a man of the world and able to embrace all things new, no doubt as he sits at the end of the bar at Salvador's and chugs away at his tenth beer of the day and sits with his other superior laowai mates and scorns curses the lost souls in need of a Whopper. Thank God too that when local KM people travel somewhere they are not like that Whopper seeker, and they throw themselves in all sorts of local cuisine with the same passion he does his 2 kuai BBQ on a stick ("hmmm! this is better than any damned Whopper!") and live easily and without complaint without that greasy bowl of red pepper flavored rice noodles they eat three times a day. That is okay of course, for local people to slurp down the same food everyday for their entire lives and never even eat one single meal that requires the use of a knife and fork, but if one of the arrogant stereotyped laowai he has pegged to perfection desire one decent burger every five years then he/she is ruining everybody else's party in paradise. How dare he desire food he/she grew up on! The local people never do that! Maybe if lihaizi had just shown some compassion to the cantankerous old fart and called out to him in his drunken slurs "heyyyy buddy, have one of these cheap ass 3% Dali beers with us and stop looking for food with actual taste in it... give up... and sit here and get pissed with us and watch all the weird foreigners walk by like zombies looking for burgers with actual meat on them! We got bagels here at Salvadors! And lots of stuff with no red peppers! An' if you have a Chinese wife half your age you can't join us, as we only allow lonely bitter guys who can't find gals in any of the countries we travel to because of our arrogant attitudes and our dependency on alcohol and hanging out with other arrogant men. We just want to sit around drunk and look at all the pretty little local girls and act like we can have any of them with a snap of our fingers since we are, in the end, ugly laowai ourselves and we are of the most arrogant variety."heyyy baby, we got some real Whoppers fer ya" up here!!!! HAHAHAHAHA! Gimme another Dali pijiu sweetheart! we're the cool foreigners who eat spicy weeds!"

Glad I don't rant too.

I'm pretty sure I'll be the last person in Kunming you're going to see drunk in public and certainly never on cheap low-alcohol beers.

Be assured that confidence is easily mistaken for arrogance by those more insecure – neither judging you nor describing the people you mentioned in yet another one of your endless and bitter rants.

Anyway, this is getting rather OT. I apologize for contributing to further derailing this forum thread.

I would say that false confidence and arrogance appear as identical states. Insecure people actually like to profess to being confident in front of others. Like the bully who is big and strong and makes sure you don't forget it. True self-confidence is seldom mistaken as arrogance. And a mere superficial reading of your post shows that you admit that are a drinker and prefer to drink heavily alone rather than in public, though you do drink in public it seems and excuse yourself and your frequent over indulgences by making clear you only drink the good stuff. probably what you think of as be intoxicated is a state filled with rationalizations and intellectulizations galore. Do you say so explicitly? No, but even an inferior being such as myself can see this cry for help in your comment. I might be able to get you some numbers if you need them.

And when you see some anguished loawai ambling down the sidewalk or street-way you have the arrogance to assume that he/she is miserable due to her lack of a western burger or Twinkie. It would not enter your judgmental mentality as you look down on them that they are just lonely, or broke up with their girlfriend or boyfriend, or their pet just died, or they got bad news from home, or they're bit sick or in a naturally depressed phase, or work is wearing them down or they are having visa problems, or just they stressed because they can't find some good mi xian or other local dish they love. Maybe they miss Chinese food from the last city they were in, like good dumplings or Beijing Duck. You just look down on them and pass on your harsh criticism of other human beings, as I am sure you do with local Chinese people as well though you want to appear to be the exceptionally cool laowai in your arrogant and snooty posts here, because, in your own deluded fantasies, you are the standard by which humanity itself is ultimately measured. "Lihaizi is the measure of all things."

And it wouldn't have been me ambling about lost on wenlin jie or wenhua xiang perversely seeking a burger -though I do amble about in a daze often in China- since I am, and have been for some time, a vegetarian. I give up on the crappy, vile meat in this city long ago.

If what you have is true confidence I will continue to exist with the lack thereof.

@BillDan

Not to egg you on, but, ditto!

You got me there, Billy boy. My room is decorated in empty baijiu bottles, I'm typing with one hand, handling the booze with the other and while I'm at it I squeal like a pig, crying over my covered-up shortcomings and traumas. Please toss me some of those numbers you were mentioning.

*burp*

BillDan hahaha you are hilarious! I love it!

Ordering too much, is firstly respecting the guests, second a show of wealth, your not not expected to eat it all, they will think you are a starving/ poor ESL teacher.

Having gone to quite a few weddings, it's all going to waste there too.
They don't use buckets, they use carts to dump the left over food.
I assume they sell it to farmers to feed the pigs.

I don't mind ordering too much. But I do reminding people how precious food is. (no matter how big their car and wallet is). Parents and grand-parents all over China starved to death during the 2nd WW and during the great turnaround/revolution. And most people in Europe know WW2 all too well as well.

Being a foreigner you can mention this and get away with it. Just take it home after dinner. Interestingly it can also give you respect and it does often open the eyes of your guests as they darn well remember it themselves or have heard their (grand) parents tell stories how they had to eat rats and cockroaches to survive (that's the mild version of the lucky ones).

I am just wondering of how fast it will change. I'm just happy they have doggybags and boxes everywhere now to take food home.

PS: want to know how it really was in China? Watch the movie: "Back to 1942"

Wasting pangolin dragon into extinction

Do you still wonder why you face coronavirus ?

Humans killing the planet, bringing animals to suffer, planet rebels

Do you know ?