Chicken's go "bak bak" pigs go - Oliver, what does a pig say?

Since the last post was a little "heavy", I wanted to post something lighter. We've been going out to eat most evenings at local restaurants without our guide. Both Glenn and Steve Ottman are pretty adventurous eaters and not shy about trying order in places where English is not on the menu. The other night we ended up some sort of dumpling place (at least that's what everyone else was eating) and thought we'd try it. No one there spoke English and the menu was only in Chinese characters. My Mandarin lessons didn't get much farther than "this is a dog, this is a cat", and I wasn't going to try that in a Chinese restaurant. Steve Ottman has a little book of "useful phases and idioms" but that didn't help either. Our original waitress eventually fled and was replaced by another who seemed to think it was all a bit of a lark. In the end Steve was reduced to trying to order chicken dumplings by making "bak bak bak" sounds and flapping his arms like a chicken. Somehow that worked because our waitress wrote down something, so we moved on to trying to order beef by mooing like cows. This produced a lot of laughter, but no order and since Glenn was looking for something vegetarian, we were now really stumped (like what do you do for a vegetable?). Finally Steve Ottman started making noises and actions that didn't match any animal I'd ever heard of, so I just looked over at our waitress and we both shrugged. Having now failed order in Mandarin, English and pantomime, we were really at a loss when our larky waitress smiled, wrote something down and left. 10 minutes later we were served a steaming bowl of mixed dumplings consisting of pork, chicken (or perhaps fish) and a really good tomato and egg dumpling. That plus 4 beers, juice for the kids and something that I swear was no different than the deep-fried chicken fingers on any Canadian kids menu - all for 10 bucks Canadian. The next morning Fontana explained that our problem was that in China, animals make different noises - right!