Chinese Roulette

One question I am consistently asked by my friends and family who are back home is "How is the food?". It's hard to explain...

The private school that is subsidizing our cost of living while in China pays for our meals, which we eat every weeknight at the hotel (and some weekends). The consistency is nice, and it's good to know that you have somewhere to eat every night. But whether or not our bellies are full by the end of the meal is highly inconsistent, and I think the best comparison I can make is to say that it's like playing Chinese Roulette.

 

The table is set with chopsticks, a plate, a tea cup, a bowl and a spoon when we arrive. Sometimes the food starts arriving really promptly, and sometimes it takes ages for it to come out, and it comes out one or two dishes at a time. Each dish is placed on a large Lazy Susan, meaning the dishes rotate from one person to the next. We have imposed a rule that we can only turn our Lazy Susan clockwise. The hotel usually brings fancier dishes to us first (read: the ones we won't eat because they consist of things like pig ears and cow stomach and/or we can't identify them), and near the end of the meal we get the things that we devour (broccoli, rice, plain noodles, and watermelon).

There have been dishes we really loved (cooked dates) and ones that we haven't touched (shrimp prepared any way with their eyes still intact, and a plate of duck including the head), but the hotel doesn't seem to do any diagnostics. It was a effort for us to make it clear to the hotel that we needed more vegetarian options (in the beginning there were only one or two dishes from the entire meal that our four vegetarians could eat, and it's still pretty inconsistent), and to insist that they bring us plain rice (which still comes at the end of the meal). But for the most part, as we get deeper into our stay here, we get more adventurous in terms of what we'll try, and there is always Grace who has a self-identified iron stomach to try things out for us and report through facial expressions if the way ahead is clear. Every night we ask ourselves if we will get boiled dumplings - something we haven't had since the first few nights here - because they are so much better than the fried ones, or if we'll even get dumplings at all. I guess you could equally compare our experience at dinner to a Forrest Gump box of chocolates - you never know what you're going to get.

 

They have fried eggs and toast for us at breakfast in addition to the enormous buffet of what appears to be re-heated/re-invented leftovers from the meals cooked the night before (they do not waste any food in China, and we are probably to blame for the quantities of food that are left-over each morning because so many of our dishes are left half-eaten or untouched). My favourite part about my breakfast at the hotel is the deep-fried churros-like bread. It's terrible, but it makes getting out of bed in the morning a little easier.

 

 

Weekends we usually go to the Western restaurants in the area, including an expensive Italian restaurant, and a not-quite-as-expensive-but-still-up-there Mexican restaurant. We have also found a great make-your-own soup place at the Parkson Mall and we have made Haagen Dasz Wednesdays a tradition (two out of two weeks!).

 

I think I will miss certain things when I go back to Canada, but it's hard to say until I get there, but I certainly appreciate the style of eating (it's a bit first-come, first-serve, but you can try a little bit of everything, a little bit at a time).

 

And I love eating with chopsticks so much that I bought a set! Look out Mom & Dad!