Last night I had a meal I could never forget, at Dining at the Dark in Kuala Lumpur. In short, I dined as the blind do. On sumptuous food. The restaurant gives to the vision-impaired, and employs them as servers and guides. You put your hands on shoulders in front of you and wind a halting, curving chain into pitch blackness to your seat, which you fumble awkwardly to find. Then you learn how to locate utensils and plates and glass, four courses one at a time. The deprivation of sight heightens your other senses, and you pay more attention to the food – to the smells, the texture, the subtle components of flavor. You try to guess what you are eating, find out at the end you often guessed wrong. Time gets distorted, too. What felt like an hour was two hours and a half. And by the end of it, I swear I had a sort of visual representation of the entire room. It wasn’t anywhere near as hard as I thought it would be, and it was far more enjoyable than I could ever have expected. I raise a blind glass, to the wonderful friend across from me, to adventurous new experiences.
Posted on: Mon, 06 Oct 2014 12:11:52 +0000
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