It means "danger". I learned it the day before I made the mashed potatoes, but apparently I didn't apply it correctly.
Allow me to show you a photo:
Yes, that is what looks like some extremely tasty and well made mashed potatoes. However, need I remind you that looks can be deceiving?
Here is a list of what normally goes into mashed potatoes: potatoes, milk, butter, salt, pepper... if you want to get fancy you'll throw in some green onions or garlic.
Any fool can make edible mashed potatoes... unless you use the following ingredients: potatoes, milk, yak butter, salt, pepper, and green onions.
They sell yak butter on the streets here; usually it's in some intestine lining that you have to peel off before using. There are about as many different kinds of yak butter as there are people in China, but they all have one flaw: they are rancid. Think a rotten cheesy foot smell.
So I took a student with me to buy butter, surely a native can discern really rancid from just a little rancid. At the little shop I asked him what the difference was between all the butters... quite clearly he told me that the one on the end was "good" butter ("delicious" he said) and all the others were bad. And since those were my options I chose the "good" butter and bought about a fourth of a pound. Everyone in the shop kept asking why I was buying so little.
So I thought to myself: "I have the good butter, and besides, how rancid can rancid be?" I mean I've eaten the stuff in tsampa before (not bad) and I've drunk about a liter of it in their infamous butter tea (no comment) but I figured that a tiny bit in some potatoes really wouldn't be noticeable.
Seriously I used less than a teaspoon of that butter and those potatoes were filthy. Filthy.
I couldn't even swallow a full spoonful without triggering my gag reflex.
Don't worry about drugs kiddos, just say no to yak butter mashed potatoes. Tha for real.
