Tyler recently reminded me to answer the following questions:
How are the girls?
How is the food?
Do you miss home?
How is the school part of this?
The first one I won't answer here, for my grandmother's sake.
The Food:
Every restaurant is cheap. Breakfast of two fried eggs and a tasty bun is $.50. Decent lunch $1.50. Expensive lunch $3. The most expensive meal I've eaten here was like $10. That was probably the best Thai food I've every had. The food is overall, excellent. If you've heard that Chinese food is very oily, you heard correctly. Chinese cooking traditionally does not use ovens or grills, so everything that isn't steamed is pan-fried or deep fried. This takes a while to get used to, from a digestive standpoint, but it's so tasty. And Chinese people are thin, right? I haven't put on any weight since I got here.
What I'm eating: eggplant, yogurt, fried eggs, chrysanthemum tea, banana chips, Kinder Bueno, dumplings, steamed buns, candied bananas...
I am in love with eggplant. A few weeks ago, I told a professor I had three stomachs: one for food, one for eggplant, and one for dessert. She hasn't let me live it down. Chinese eggplant is longer, thinner, and more flavorful than Italian eggplant. I find it is the safest thing to order in restaurants, because it's inherently moist and therefore nearly impossible to overcook. In addition to being the safest choice, it is also frequently the tastiest. All of my friends know what to order for me if I'm running late.
Chinese yogurt has several interesting characteristics. 1) You don't have to refrigerate it, because it is sufficiently infused with preservatives. 2) You don't eat it, you drink it. Physically, it pours like cream. Linguistically, in order to describe yogurt as tasty in Chinese you have to say 好喝, literally "good to drink"; if you describe yogurt as 好吃 ("good to eat"), your Chinese companion will correct you. 3) 原味 (literally "original flavor") means "no flavor added besides a bunch of sugar". I have not yet found true plain yogurt, though I did find AB100, which contains extra bacteria... good for the soul.
I eat a lot of eggs at home, and I was delighted to find eggs everywhere. The cafeteria in my dorm serves fried eggs for 1.50 yuan each (~$.20). The Chinese use a lot of oil here too, but damn are they good. I hit the cafeteria at 7 am to get the first hot ones. Today, I showed up at 7:20 and the woman working there pretended to give me a hard time for being late. The first two weeks I ate 蛋饼 (egg pancakes) every day for breakfast at a street stall. Take a scallion pancake, break and egg in it, fry, add cilantro and spicy sauce, and you have a 蛋饼. They're extremely good and damn cheap (1 yuan), but I'm convinced they were contributing heavily to my 拉肚子 (the Chinese word for diarrhea, less jarring in conversation than the English word). Also, the cafeteria only has chopsticks, so I had to take a week to figure out how to elegantly eat fried eggs with chopsticks. If the eggs are over-hard (as opposed to over-easy), chopsticks are far easier than a fork and knife, because you can pick up the whole thing and bite off pieces. I'm definitely going to bring that custom home.
China is a tea culture. Coffee here is, for the most part, awful. The "coffee shop" in my dorm (little more than a two fridges of cold drinks and a freezer full of ice cream, charges you 5 yuan for a cup of instant coffee. Instant. I don't think I've ever run into an establishment in the US that serves instant coffee. It's not really a problem though, because I don't drink it. When in Rome... drink tea. I'm not really sure why, but the only tea I've really been drinking is chrysanthemum tea. China has a lot of green tea, oolong tea, red tea, etc, etc, but sometime in the first few days I started on chrysanthemum tea and never looked back. It's mild, yet flavorful, and looks good too (white flowers swirling in hot water). I think I can find the stuff in Westport.
Dried fruit is much more common here in than at home. There's a dried fruit aisle at the supermarket. One of my friends bought banana chips one day... we don't have fridges in our rooms, so anything that keeps well on the shelf is good dorm food. I started eating banana chips by the bag. I decided yesterday to give those up, because I found them more addictive than Pringles. Do not buy me banana chips as a coming home gift. Give me a few of yours instead.
I'm really not a candy man. I can't think of any circumstances under which I would purchase candy at home. Here, however, a circumstance has arisen. It involves my next door neighbors, Sterling and Christina, and my unfortunate home life. I don't get a long with my roommate very well. That story is neither particularly simple nor interesting. It's not that big of a deal, but as a result, all else equal, I prefer not to be in my room. As it turned out that Sterling and Christina are two of my best friends here, and they're both very laid back. One day I fell asleep on one of their beds while hanging out. We were all pretty comfortable with that arrangement, so it became a custom. I think I've napped on one of their beds every day this week. We've joked with the director of the program here about moving my bed into their room. Of course, nothing comes for free. They charge me rent: one Kinder Bueno bar a day. Sterling introduced me to the stuff at the beginning of the semester and I'm developing a problem. I swear to God they put crack in that stuff. If you haven't tried it before, split one with a friend... ideally a really good friend of compatible orientation, because under the right lighting conditions I've heard that magic happens (that's hyperbole, not euphemism; sorry for the confusion, Sterling's boyfriend).
Chinese 饺子 (dumplings) and 包子 (steamed buns) are ubiquitous and range in quality from pedantic to outstanding. Obviously, the latter are better. You're probably familiar with these, so I won't spend too much time on this. However, dumplings are much better with vinegar than with soy sauce, and if you come across soup-filled steamed buns (a Shanghai specialty) you must eat them. I went to a Shanghai-ese restaurant with the director and she stuff my friend and I full of all sorts of food. At the time, we were unable to finish the plate of these buns, so we took them home. 15 minutes later, still stuffed, but no longer able to resist temptation, I finished them off. It's possible that I actually have four stomachs (making me comparable to a cow with respect to gastrointestinal complexity), the fourth reserved solely for these buns.
Then there's 拔丝 (basi) fruit. Literally, 拔丝 means "drawing wire". It refers to a manner of making candied fruit. I honestly don't know what they do, but it involves sugar, oil, sections of fruit, and voodoo. The result is a large heap of hot, gleaming, and unbelievably sticky indulgence. The name comes from the fact that when you try to grab a piece, you sugary threads try to keep the pack together. You dip the piece in a bowl of water to cut the threads, and may then discover why I live to eat, and not the other way around. If you wait too long and let the dish cool, there is nothing commonly found on a dinner table that can help you separate the pieces from the plate. My favorite flavor is banana.
I really don't want to go home and eat American food... ugh. Somebody super-size my summer.
