Hehe! Looks like there are a number of "foodies" on the Forum
. Ah-bin knows enough of my background to know that I could go on about food for ages!Hmmm... Now I'm really doubtful about my own account of "ka-li-mai-fan". Indeed, what I describe is similar to (non-asam) laksa, except that I'm not sure whether Penang non-asam laksa has blood cockles in it. Anyway, pointless to speculate - I'll ask my parents and report back here. [Or perhaps Andrew or Mark might care to comment...]
No, they have lots of (traditional European) soups. I meant that the (local, very well-integrated since the 60's) *Chinese* restaurants in the Netherlands didn't use to have *noodle* soups. They might have had other sorts of Chinese soup though - thng1 - but I don't remember clearly one way or the other. The only thing thing I remember clearly is the absence of noodle soups from the menu, because I found this totally weird, seeing as noodle soups are so common in Chinese culture.Thanks, interesting to know about Dutch not having "soup"... not even chicken or mushroom soup?
Three further comments:
1. I'm not familiar with thick rice noodles. The only rice noodles (bi2-hun2) I know are always quite thin (approx 1mm thick). Hmmm... come to think of it, I know of *extra* thin rice noodles, which are almost as fine as "mi7-suaN3". Perhaps what I call "normal" and "extra thin" are what you call "thick" and "thin"...?
2. I found it interesting to hear that for you the "default" form of uan-than-mi is the dried form. For me, it's definitely the soup form, the dried one (as Andrew pointed out - I'd forgotten that there were uan-than in kon-lo mi) is the "exotic", "Cantonese" form. In fact, I hardly think of it as a form of uan-than-mi at all, just as a seperate dish.
3. Interesting, the intrusive -i in 同安 Hokkien. Is it only when the following syllable begins with a vowel?
Further side 'cultural' note: There was another interesting feature of Chinese restaurants in the Netherlands, which I indirectly referred to in my earlier posting. For most of the 80's and 90's, there were two distinct menus in Chinese restaurants. The first was for the Dutch locals: it had the names of the dishes in Chinese characters (often with Cantonese transcription underneath), with the descriptions in Dutch underneath. The second was purely in Chinese characters, and obviously meant only for Chinese. The first sort was standardly put on every table, whereas the second sort you would only get if you asked for it. Very often, they were even of different colours, layout, size etc. The interesting thing was that there were often dishes on the one menu not on the other, and vice versa. (I suppose this made *some* sense, in that things like pig's intestines etc would have been appealing to the Chinese and not to the native Dutch.) I remember something very similar in Chinatown in London. I think this split is much less common nowadays, as Westerners learn to eat more and more "exotic" things (I have white friends who like chicken's feet, for example), and (correspondingly) more and more Chinese find some of the more exotic things repulsive (as a young child, I used to hate seeing the chicken head floating about among the other parts of the chicken in a chicken dish in soup).
) but I dare not try pig or mammal's brain. I once ate pig's heart cooked with herbal tonic (tim7-por2 燉補), it tasted like chicken heart but much bigger, and I was a bit wary as the shape/size reminded me of human's. 
I like certain sashimi (esp. salmon & swordfish) but not really raw oysters. Japanese even have horse sashimi, sounds repugnant to me.
(IMHO).]