You Are What You Eat

Hungry?

If a picture is worth a thousand words, hopefully this blog will make up for lost time.  I'm going to attempt to create for you the eating experience of China.  The adventure begins on the street.  Since most restaurants lack the capacity to hold onto raw ingredients for more than a day or so - either due to less-than-hygienic standards for keeping food, or more likely the lack of space in the establishment itself - raw food is delivered daily or purchased in markets.  Many times, they give cooks the pleasure of killing your own, so frequently you'll see a chicken on your way to school and come back to find a substantially less living, naked thing in its place.

Dan Dan Noodles

Our regular restaurant

Very quickly, you find that every dish is prepared differently in different restaurants but you learn what places do what dishes and which way you like them.  One such staple is 担担面 known in the states as Dan Dan Noodles.  It's a peanut-based dish with plenty of numbing pepper, the source of Sichuan's notorious spice.
 

The origin of takeout

The place above also is good for Gai Fan, which basically means meat and vegetables on rice.  There are lots of different varieties of it, but the picture to the right shows my favorite - twice-cooked pork with onion.  It also demonstrates takeout at it's simplest: a disposable bowl in a plastic bag.  Another big hitter cuisine-wise in this province is what we in America have come to know as Kong Pao Chicken, that delicious chicken with chunks of cucumber, peanuts and (naturally) more numbing pepper.  Now while Dan Dan Noodles and Gai Fan are individual dishes, Kong Pao Chicken and most other dishes like it are served "family-style."

Beef w/ Peppers

 

Potato Straws; KP Chicken; Onion Beef

That is to say, everybody grabs some chopsticks and digs in, throwing a few pieces from the main plate into your own bowl.  Between the mainly oil-based dishes and all the MSG, it doesn't sound healthy, does it?  To give you some more glimpses of what we're eating here are some other dishes.

Street food

Now there are more restaurants than we could count and rather than learn each place's name, we elect to refer to them by defining features such as, "The red curtains," or, "The place outside of the west gate," or my personal favorite, "the one with the waiter so-and-so has a crush on."  But these restaurants tend to close early and to address this problem, there is street food.  Street Food is any and all meals coming from a tricycle stand or cart.  These can be miniature fried peanut butter and jelly pancakes, Korean BBQ, dough-based omelets, as well as sweet potatoes or pineapple skewers.  To the right is a sort of pork burger with lettuce and egg, delicious and cheap.


Now while I've given particular notice to the meat and the carbs, there are other food groups that need to be represented.  Tomato and Egg make the base for many soups and noodle dishes, sometimes served just by itself - not a big hit for me but a popular entre during family-style.  China has also introduced me to eggplant in fish sauce, a new favorite vegetable of mine.  And while the fish sauce is delicious, you'll notice very few pictures involving fish itself.  It isn't a lack of fish in the area, it's that fish come fully boned with tiny strands as difficult to swallow as to pluck out.

Family-style: a roaring success

Eggplant

Tomato w/ Egg

Lastly, I want to introduce you to my new favorite dish, my personal creation, 宫爆鸡蛋炒饭.  After much urging, I convinced a restaurant to make Kong Pao Chicken on Egg Fried Rice - a phenomenal mixture, (likely with double the MSG) that despite their initial doubts and weird looks, has brought the restaurant a few extra patrons - both, American and Chinese.  In the future, I'll hopefully have more to show you along the lines of food as well as some of the new discoveries that I'm making each meal.  Until then, thanks for reading.

Don't joke the monkeys.

I have to apologize, dear blog, for the lack of correspondence between us as of late.  As I type this, I have a cold and feel that out of laziness, I will use that as an excuse to sum up the entirety of my absence.  In reality, it's been exhaustion, day trips and an overall increase in my diligence towards studying(!).  Since I last wrote you, I have had a few more adventures in China.  Following the wedding and car show that I partook in, I used the money to purchase a saxophone.  Hopefully I'll be using this to play some gigs in the future but I've come to the conclusion that it's souvenir enough to make me content just to take it home and look at it, remembering the absurdity of the way I got it - and of the instrument itself.  To sum it into a single word, I'd call it "gaudy."  Caution, the below picture is not for the faint of heart.

That's right.  It's pink.  In China, the more different you appear, the more exotic and high class you MUST be.  And a pink saxophone is pretty... or rather, pretty different.

But there were, in fact, other contributing factors.  This was one of the cheaper horns which is good since it's not impossible that it gets trashed on the flight home, even as a carry on.  Who knows?  Maybe someday, I'll have some daughter cherish this pink panther sax.

However, this endeavor reawakened the business major in me that had been quiet for nearly a semester.  So in order to help fund my new saxophone, I have begun to tutor a 6 year old on Sundays.  As an American, you might think that 6 is a little early to start tutoring sessions, but don't worry - it's only for an hour.  After that it's back to ping pong practice which he has three days a week, piano which he has once a week, and calligraphy class.  He has other activities, his mother assures me, but either due to translation problems or memory, they currently escape me.

So last Sunday was our first meeting and this coming Sunday will be our official tutoring sessions.  (Consisting of playing with cars and pretending to shoot each others' car till they explode - oddly enough explosions sound the same in every language.)  However during this past week, I've gone on an overnight class trip to Emei Shan, a gorgeous mountain.  There are many amazing things about Emei Shan - you can get to a certain peak that, at sunrise casts your shadow with a halo around you for a couple minutes about 70 times a year; it has some spectacular waterfalls and some pretty cool temples.  However, something it is notorious for though, is its monkeys.

"Caution the aggressive monkeys here. don't joke the monkeys.

A couple days ago, the idea of a monkey to me, was an adorable, slender creature - round eyes, kind and hilarious in any given situation.  There will be no such monkeys in this blog.  These monkeys, were fat.  They were ugly, grotesque.  They had tumors large enough to contain multiple types of cancer.  But don't think that my feelings for them stem from looks alone.  I'd show you pictures, but I didn't have time to take any.  (That and I was warned of their tendency towards theft of personal property.)  These monkeys assaulted us.  Emei Staff were situated every 5 meters or so to threaten and in some cases, hit monkeys with bamboo sticks when they - not "should they," but when they - jumped onto your head.  Tears were shed, blood was spilled.  It is said that animals sense fear;  well apparently, they also sense your desire to not have their teeth inside your body.  That doesn't dissuade them, however, and I've officially witnessed one too comrades fall victim to a hostile, monkey engagement. They came out with bites and scratches to say the least.  Those will fade with time, but one thing will reign supreme in my mind with regard to that day.  Never go up to a monkey, with a stick, yelling, "Come at me, Bro, come at me!"