Thursday, October 2, 2008

Food...Finally!
















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Hi everyone,
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I've been promising a food blog, but thinking about actually writing one has been overwhelming. There is just so much to share about the food and the food culture here. As many of you know, I hate Chinese food! Well, I don't anymore. In fact, I've found foods here that I absolutely love and will really miss when I eventually leave China.
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Let's start with the unusual and downright gross. So far, I've eaten intestines, brain (see happy photo above), stomach, chicken feet, pig feet, pig ear, whole fried fish (head and all), chicken bone (really the black skin around it). I think that's it. There's a lot I'm willing to try, but the one thing I refuse to eat is the congealed blood. I just won't do it. I didn't try the insects on a stick (shown above), but I'm not opposed to it. Maybe when Anna comes, we'll give it a go. On the not gross but unusual list, I'll include red bean frozen popsicle, green jello popsicle, fried corn, pickled egg, seaweed soup FOR BREAKFAST...THREE DAYS IN A ROW!!!,
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The thing about eating in China is that it's hard work. Eating isn't easy. I think that's the main reason why a lot of Chinese people are pretty thin...it just takes too much time and effort to eat much. For example, almost all meat comes on the bone, so you have to gnaw around the bone for just the tiniest amount of meat. The picture above shows how meat often comes still put together; the animal is just cooked whole. So disassembling it is a task. All fruit is peeled, so even having an apple requires effort. All kinds of nuts and seeds are sold in the shell, and de-shelling them is often pretty challenging. I've even eaten lotus flower seeds that are sold still inside the stem, so you must pop them out of the top of the stem and then peel them--hard work for just a little seed.
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I, however, have managed to gain a little bit of weight recently because I eat so much rice. I love rice! I can eat it a couple times a day (which I usually do), and I never get tired of it. I'm trying to limit my rice intake, but it's pretty hard. People in the south of China eat rice, and people in the north of China eat noodles and dumplings made of flower. Rice noodles are popular here; some I like and some I really do not. I haven't had as much jiaozi (dumplings) here in Tongren as I had in Chengdu, but I can still find them pretty easily.
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In fact, Jacq (my sitemate) and I have started buying frozen jiaozi from the grocery store because they are so quick to make. And I buy frozen baozi (steamed bread filled with pork) which I absolutely love. Other than that, we usually eat rice and vegetables.
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It seems that the main style of dining in Tongren are these little restaurants that serve rice and vegetables. The vegetables are laid out raw in plastic containers. You take a plate and with provided kuaizi (chopsticks), you take a little of each vegetable and/or tofu you want and put it on your plate. The laoban (boss) then stirfries it up for you, adding a little pork, which is the main meat in this part of the country. Then you eat your stirfried vegetables with a bowl of rice. This meal costs 5 kuai, which is about 75 cents. So this is my normal lunch and sometimes dinner.
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The popular regional meal in this part of China (especially in Sichuan) is Hot Pot (huo guo). The first photo above is Hot Pot, which is essentially a boiling pot of oil and lajiao (the local red pepper). It is spicy and greasy as hell. In the hot oil, we drop meats, vegetables, tofu, noodles. After they are done cooking, we fish them out with our chopsticks, and we dip them in another bowl of oil, garlic, vinigar, and cilantro. In the morning, after a night of Hot Pot, I have what I like to call a "Hot Pot Hangover," essentially laduzi (diarrhea). So I try to avoid eating Hot Pot. But whenever a group gets together, it's usually Hot Pot that everyone wants to eat.
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I should also talk about banquet culture. At a banquet, you can spend several hours, but not much of the time is spent eating. Most of the time, people talk and play mahjang. The time for eating is just for eating (and drinking). A few weeks ago, Jacq and I were sent to another town several hours away called Sinan to give speeches at two local high schools. This meant that we had two banquets with the respective English departments and administration representatives. At the banquets, we ate A LOT (see the aftermath in the photo above), and we drank beer. We made a bit of a faux pas by toasting our own school adminstration representative before we toasted everyone of our host school's members. Oooops. Well, we're still learning. And apparently, we drank too much the first time, so it was recommended that we stop drinking for the evening. Drinking culture is confusing. We didn't know where the line was exactly, but perhaps we crossed it. Apparently, neither volunteer before us drank at all with other school members, so I think our school's foreign affairs officer was surprised. (But we found out later that he thought we did a good job on the trip, so I think we're okay).
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The thing about drinking at a banquet is that if you are toasted, you are supposed to toast back. Well, since we're the foreign guests, everyone wanted to toast us, and some people toasted us more than once. So we had that many toasts, and then we had to reciprocate, doubling the amount that we were drinking. On a side note, the two toasting rituals we know are (1) if you are toasted with "gambei," you have to down your entire glass, and (2) you should always touch the top of your glass to the bottom of the other person's glass as a sign of respect. Sometimes, people will have a contest and take their glasses down to the floor.
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Back to food, here are some foods I have grown to really love and will absolutely miss when I leave: lotus root (already missing it because I can't find it in Tongren), fungus, yuxiang qiezi (eggplant in fish sauce), bean paste pastries, pumpkin cookies, scallion egg pancakes, smoked tofu, stirfried water spinach, cantelope ice cream cones, peach popsicles, breaded and fried bananas.
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I'm not missing food from home that much anymore, but sometimes I would kill for a big, greasy plate of Mexican food and some delicious curry. But I'm adjusting well to the food here and to eating with chopsticks. I'm pretty good, in fact. In the photo above, I had just gotten to China, so you can see I'm holding them in the middle like a beginner, but I now hold them at the top. I'm still learning more foods and how to ask for them. Jacq and I want to expand our diets, so we're learning how to read menus and how to order a bigger variety of dishes.
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Eating here is really very cheap. As I mentioned earlier, our regular meal of rice and stirfry costs 5 kuai (about 75 cents). Our cheapest dinner was boiled vegetables at 2 kuai (about 30 cents). A week ago or so, Jacq and I splurged on a dinner of dishes which cost each of us about 20 kuai (about 3 dollars). A big bottle of beer is usually 3 or 4 kuai (50 or 60 cents). Sometimes, we go all out and get a bottle of Chinese wine (not very good) or Chinese brandy (pretty good) for about 35 kuai (about 5 dollars). Imported alcohol is usually out of the question. For example, our closest grocery store sells imported Italian chianti (which is pretty cheap in America) for 140 kuai (20 bucks!!!!). There's no way I can afford that. So good wine will be out of my diet for a few years. Oh, side note, the imported American beer that the same store sells (in great quantity) is PBR!
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Okay, I think that's enough for this blog entry. Sorry if I overloaded you with food talk, but it has been quite an experience for me, and I'm happy to say that I'm doing pretty well. (But I'd still like that Christmas care package, Connie!).
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Love you and miss you all,
Jennifer