dropped

Carlos and I took a bus to Barrio Chino today. It broke down halfway through our trip and we transferred to another bus. Because it wasn't run by the same bus company, we had to pay an additional fare. The company whose bus broke down did not reimburse us. Carlos did his best to argue our position but no other passenger seemed bothered by this imposed subsidy. We paid our fare and dropped the matter.

Our mood, injected by our excitement for adventure, remained bright and we searched out a "highly recommended" chifa (Salon Capon) in Barrio Chino for dim sum. We found it, though were disappointed by the lack of pushcart-style dim sum ubiquitous in New York and California.

At the end of a satisfying meal, I found a rat dropping at the bottom of my chrysanthemum tea.

All right. It may not have been a rat dropping. At least that's what the managers claimed. A Chinese woman even brought out the dried chrysanthemum and yelled that there are dark parts to the flowers. My stance was: after drinking tea, of all varieties, for the past 20 years, I know the difference between a twig and a black thingy that looks like sausage links that could have come from the intestines of a small, rodent-sized animal.

We explained that the restaurant was filthy and wondered what else could have been in the other food we just consumed in the last two hours. We should not be expected to pay the bill.

By this point, the managers have stopped insisting that it was tea that I saw. However, they continued to treat us with hostility and demanded that we pay the bill. Well, actually, they threatened our waiter. If we didn't pay the bill, the waiter's job would be in jeopardy and our bill would be docked from his pay.

Eventually the police was called. The policeman advocated for the restaurant. His logic was that since we ate all the food and only found the Black Thing in the tea, we should pay for the food and not pay for the tea.

First, if you ate all your tomato soup and found a rat at the bottom of the bowl, should you still be expected to pay for the soup? Would you be expected to pay for the pasta with tomato sauce and salad with sliced tomatoes even though the pasta and salad did not appear to be garnished with dead rat? If you found a Black Thing in one dish, would you be glad to know that you had polished off the other dishes? Or would you question everything you've eaten and what the diners at the other tables are eating?

Second, the tea was complimentary.

We stood our ground. The policeman invited us to the police station to resolve matters. At the station, another officer tried to reason with us. If we didn't have another appointment to keep, it would have been an interesting (and terrifying) experiment to see what they would've done to try to get us to pay. We didn't know our rights.

In the end, we paid the bill and resolved to make a complaint to a consumer agency.

Cancelling our check would have been a nice courtesy. It is definitely what people with our backgrounds would expect. But not true in Lima. Fine. But what about restaurant hygiene, worker's rights, and consumer's rights?

Our mistake was distilling this incident into paying a bill. Bill not paid: police get involved; bill paid: police work done. Problem solved—the bigger questions of what was a rat dropping doing in our food, what is the restaurant going to do about it, and how can they make a waiter financially accountable for conditions not of his making have all been ostensibly solved because we paid the bill, the restaurant owners got their money, the waiter kept his job and pay, and conflict was resolved.

I would call it ball dropped.