The Food So Far

One thing I was nervous about for China was the food.  I LOVE food, and I love ethnic food... for the most part.  But the two weeks I spent in China a couple of years ago got me dreading the food I'd be eating for the next few months.

But you know, so far it hasn't been that bad at all!  We are fed every weekday meal in the faculty cafeteria, and it is pretty decent!  Breakfast is my favorite meal, which is funny because I generally dislike American breakfast food.  But it is always very bready here which I appreciate.  We usually get these buns filled with meat.  Tasty.  Today we had egg roll type things which I filled up on because I loved them so much!  Yesterday we were basically fed yellow cake for breakfast, so that was fun.  Probably my favorite breakfast are these things: I don't know what they are called here but they are definitely mochi filled with dumpling filling.  SO GOOD.

Lunch and dinner usually consist of a mystery meat, some kind of soup, boiled greens (which I eat lots of - yum!), and rice.  Good old rice, keeping us alive these days.  You can never go wrong with that stuff!  Other things can disappoint, though, like the super tasty egg drop soup I was eating the other day.  Well, Mitch just had to go and point out the baby eels in the soup!  I picked one out so that you can see its squishiness and its little eyes.  I stopped eating it immediately, but will always remember the particular chewiness of baby eels.

Sometimes the mystery meat isn't so mysterious after all.... check out these chicken feet (those nails!!!)

I couldn't get myself to try them but Bailey did.  You bite off the meat, chew it up, and spit out the nails.  He said they taste just like chicken wings.  I hope to find some fried chicken feet, because I would try those... but boiled?!  Ew.

So really, the cafeteria food isn't that bad.  I can always find something that I like, and leave feeling mostly full.  Plus I'm not about to complain about free food!  But sometimes we just can't do it, so we hit our favorite restaurant for some handmade Muslim noodles! Best $2 meal you can find around here (that we know of at least).

The noodles have the most delicious chewiness that I cannot describe!  I don't know if I've ever had handmade noodles before, but even if I had, I'm sure these ones would take the cake.  Plus the owners are super cute and nice.  The lady is the chattiest person, she doesn't even care that we can't understand her, she will just stand and talk and talk to us and we just nod.  Actually, the first time we walked in she got really excited and ran us to the back of the restaurant so she could show us a picture of two white kids our age.  Haha, probably some other ILP teachers that frequented her place!

Of course, when the food gets really hard, there's always that big bag of French fries in the apartment freezer.  A whole bunch of fries and some American soda will suffice for a meal.