REAL Chinese food :)
Posted September 6th, 2010 by Monica
About a two minute walk away from the dorm is a fruit stand. I can get fresh fruit for breakfast every morning on the way to the Central College office. I’ve only tried the apples and the peaches, and they’re super fresh. The fruit is pretty safe, so I know I’m going to make several stops there in the future. Four pieces cost about 80 cents (5 kwai) so that’s a pretty awesome deal.
A few nights ago, we had the welcome dinner. We all walked to this fancy restaurant in a hotel. The table was set up in its own little room. Miss Li then instructed us in Chinese table manners. For example, the host always sits in the seat facing the door. The most honored guest sits to her left and another person from the host’s party sits to her right. Every other seat sits a member of the host party, then a guest, then a host. But pretty much all of us were guests, so it didn’t really matter much at this meal. Miss Li asked for a menu, and the waiter gave her this ginormous book of a thing. Every dish had pictures, which would be helpful if I ever had to order food. Miss Li ordered so many different foods. We had pumpkin with lily (like the flower), spicy bullfrog soup (which was pretty good, actually), soup that tasted like buffalo wings, fish that melted in your mouth (and incredibly difficult to eat with chopsticks…), this amazing dong po ro which was alternating layers of fat and pork in this tasty sauce, black fungus (which if dipped in vinegar wasn’t too awful), and so many more things that I can’t even remember. Miss Li also ordered a surprise for us–smiley fries! It was good to see something familiar. But I think my favorites were the fish and the dong po ro.
For lunch on Tuesday, we went to this place nicknamed Muslims. We don’t really know the names for places, so we make up nicknames for places, and the only thing we know about this place is that it’s run by Muslim Chinese. This place had amazing handmade noodles. We’d see the chefs stretch out the noodles, and you could tell that each noodle wasn’t exactly the same width. I’ve never had homemade noodles before. The noodles themselves were softer and dough-ier. There were onions and peppers in it too, with pork I think. Delicious.
For dinner, we went to a little place nicknamed Pacmans (due to the little guy’s red cousin on the sign). It was deliciously cheap. Four of us shared a meal, and it came out to around 4 kwai (65 cents) a person. We got bao zi which is dumplings, ro su mien which was meat with noodles, and ban mien which was peanut butter noodles. THAT was strange. It tasted exactly how it sounds: oily peanut butter with noodles. It wasn’t terribly awful…we tried to make it better with hot sauce, and that didn’t work. Then we tried adding vinegar, and that just made it terrible. The verdict was that it was alright, but we wouldn’t be ordering it again.
For lunch on Wednesday, Miss Li took Grisell and me out to lunch at a chicken place downtown. We had gone to China Mobile to get our phones during the morning, and it took a looong time. Lunch time came, so we all went out for lunch. Miss Li ordered chicken and mushroom soup for us, and chicken and bamboo shoots for herself. It also came with evergreens, black fungus, pickled radish (which was weird), cucumbers, and small beans. Everything was delicious. All of a sudden, I picked out a piece of meat from my soup, and it was a soggy chicken foot! “Oh my, a chicken foot,” was my response (believe me, I was freaking out on the inside!!) Miss Li laughed and asked if I was going to eat it, I said “Nooo”. She said she liked chicken feet, so I gave it to her. I also saw she ate another one in her soup a little while later. Weird, so weird.
We visited the wetlands on Thursday, and for lunch, we went to an old styled restaurant. Miss Li ordered a whole bunch of interesting things, like eel (strange, but good), eggplant (my favorite at this meal), snails (kind of like clams. I almost couldn’t do it, but I did it, I tried it.), chicken soup (like intense chicken soup–the whole chicken was cooked in the soup!), these crispy little fish (you’re supposed to eat the entire thing! I couldn’t do it, I tried it, but I couldn’t eat the whole thing), cabbage (like normal cooked cabbage), and of course, rice. So while everyone would agree that most of the food here is delicious, there are a few things I’ve seen which seem slightly off to my Westernized palate. Like chicken feet, snails, whole fish and peanut butter noodles. But all in all the food has been delicious, and I’m excited to try even more places.






























