A Month In and How Delicious

Nǐ hǎo, wǒ de péngyǒu (Hello my friends), it has been a bout a month into China and it has been an exciting month. We have become comfortable with our surroundings and have been exploring the area around our school more and more. For me this means finding new places to eat. There are now four places that I like to go to around campus. I wish I could tell you their names, but the truth is I don’t know them. The first is an outdoor market under the bridge right outside of school. You can buy items to take back to your room like fruits or nuts, but the best part is the street food they sell there. They have such a wide selection of food that it’s hard to mention them all. Mostly though its prepared dishes, grilled meats or select what ingredients you want and they cook those for you. My favorite though is guōtiē, which are pan-fried dumplings. Next is a restaurant on the other side of the bridge that we eat at least twice a week. We have a few stables we get when we go there. Our newest favorite is as the group calls it chocolate tofu, it is deep fried tofu with nuts and a sauce that taste like chocolate. There is always qiézi (eggplant), which I’ve stated before is delicious. Jiǎozi, which are, steamed dumplings; they are accompanied by cù (vinegar). A side not I have not seen soy sauce at all since coming to China. We have asked the Chinese students about it and they say it’s mostly a Japanese item. Around the corner from the school is a restaurant that serves donkey. It is incredibly delicious (for more info read Krysta last blog post). Lastly is a restaurant that specializes in the cuisine that comes from a region that a couple of our Chinese friends are from. I liken it to a combination of Mediterranean, Indian and Chinese food it is so hard to describe, but so delicious. One of my favorite parts of going out is the ordering process.

Our Chinese friends have also taken us to restaurants far from the school. For this we take the rail system that about a twenty-minute walk from the school. The fare ranges from 2-5 yuan depending how far you go. This weekend we went to two new restaurants Spice Spirit and a place that serves bāozi (stuffed steamed buns). These two places couldn’t be more different from one another, but both were delicious. Spice Spirit specializes in the cuisine from Sichuan and the décor is very nice. The food was supposed to be really spicy, but we think they toned it down for us since we were foreigners. This upset of because we all like and wanted spicy food. We had so many dishes there cauliflower, frog legs, a soup with crab roe and tofu, braised vegetables with bacon and mushrooms, spareribs and a whole fish (which they brought alive to the table for us to see) that they cooked submerged in oil with bean sprouts and Sichuan peppercorns (which messes with your taste). For the fish they brought out a slice of toast to soak up the oil from the fish. When the bread came out everyone wanted to eat it, since we don’t come across bread much here. For the restaurant that serves bāozi our friendsPaul and Bill took us there. It is a hole in the wall (which is typically my favorite places). We had three kinds of bāozi meat, vegetables, and fennel. They were all so delicious, the buns kept the inside nice and moist and the texture contrast between the two was surreal. We had other dishes as well. We had a dish of slightly pickled vegetables, shredded pork, some kind of fruit that was jammy, and beef that was prepared the same way that ham is in the States.

I can’t believe how good the food is here; it is going to be hard for me to go back to the States. I do miss some things, mostly breakfast. I am looking forward though to trying new items and new cuisines while I’m here or during my trips to Thailand and hopefully Vietnam, Japan and Korea. Zàijiàn (goodbye), till next time. Reanyalex@gmail.com