Food, glorious food

No idea what this is ... but pretty, yes?

 At dinner on Saturday my nephew asked about China - "so what did you eat?" This from a 16 year old who refuses to eat vegetables and rarely eats anything good for him - and who's now about 6' 4".

Lotus root, cold pork and Sichuan pork (kung pao!)

So I started by saying what we didn't eat, or what we rarely ate -- and that was rice. I assumed since that it was an integral part of all of the Chinese food that I'd eaten in my life in the US that a) it would be a major portion of every meal, and b) I could just live off rice if the food was just too weird. I had already decided that I would be adventurous and also committed to eating meat, something that I normally don't do that often in the US. (Turns out this was a good move, as the real vegetarians in our group struggled at times.)

Mixed vegetables and jellyfish

Most of our meals were delightful affairs that I later heard referred to as ten course dinners: we sat at giant tables with Lazy Susans in the middle, and dish after dish would be delivered throughout the meal. While much of the food was recognizable, we had to turn at every meal to our guide AJ and ask what several of the entrees were, and he'd reply "pork," "chicken" or "mushrooms," etc. I felt like I stuffed myself at every meal, yet as one of my colleagues noted we probably didn't eat as much because we were enjoying a little bit of everything and eating slowly, enjoying the company of our companions. Exactly!

Devouring a meal at a Thai restaurant

Where did we eat? Hotels, neighborhood restaurants, tourist restaurants, airplanes, etc. The hotel buffets were always part American/part Chinese, so I had mornings where I had fruit, pork dumplings, cabbage and a croissant. We ate with our hosts (the Chinese People's Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries) in a magnficent ballroom in their compound, which was once part of the Italian Embassy.  The most unusual was the Mongolian restaurant where each group of about 8-9 sat on cloth benches around a table inside our own private yurt! I refused to eat a meal in an American fast food restaurant - KFC (especially) and McDonald's were everywhere - though I did give in and enjoy a Dairy Queen Moolatte and a coffee at Starbucks, which turned out to be two of the most expensive things I consumed on my trip. P.S. to China: y'all have to get with the coffee program - those little shots of mud in the hotel buffets were abysmal.

I also ventured off the beaten path to have dinner with two friends where we had to point to the pictures on the menu, but it was good and cheap. Our waitress (pictured above) spoke no English and seemed a little terrified of us. You can see her putting in our order on what appeared to be a mobile phone, by the way - love the technology.

Could not do frog - just couldn't.

Most memorable foods? I don't think of myself as an advenurous eater, particularly when it comes to the texture of the food, so I passed on several choices that were just too "squishy" for me - the jellyfish, squid, several kinds of mushrooms, etc. I also had to pass up some things that were just too, um, realistic, like the little frogs pictured above. But I did learn to enjoy devouring cooked shrimp whole (shell, legs, antennae and eyes), I did try the soup that was indeed pork skin floating in a broth (though it wasn't crunchy like I hoped it would be), and I enjoyed the chicken joints (!) and the yak's milk (was that really yak's milk?). My favorite meal was the last one in Shanghai, where I tagged along with a vegetarian to a vegan restaurant he'd read about online. We had this excellent curried rice and noodles (with faux meat) that you see just below - man, that was excellent. We each also had two dumplings and hot tea, and the whole meal was less than $10 combined.

   

How did we eat? Chopsticks, all the way. My dexterity increased phenomenally, as did my appreciation for these devices. I even mastered the noisy noodle slurp.

It was amusing to have the flight attendant on the return flight from Shanghai to Chicago confirm that I had a vegetarian meal. Oh yeah, I thought, I guess I did order that, my mind briefly flickering back over all of the pork, beef, chicken, duck, and seafood I'd eaten in the past 11 days. And when it arrived - naturally, some random bland mishmash of fruits - I just shrugged and devoured it. Welcome back to the US!